Most affordable website hosting in South Africa — From R25 per month

South African small businesses can get a basic website hosting package from local providers for as little as R25 per month.

Internet penetration has surged in South Africa in recent years, driven by smartphone adoption and lower data prices.

The number of households with access to the Internet reached 79% by 2022, up from 21.1% in 2011. The penetration is estimated to have kept growing during the past three years.

Many more people are finding products and services on the Internet than in the past, making it essential for businesses to be online to be competitive.

While social media platforms can go a long way towards growing a customer website, a website describing your company’s history and background adds more authenticity to your offerings.

It can also be a great marketing tool to reach people who are not using social media.

In addition, a website could be core to your operations, especially if you plan on selling products through an online store.

There are several excellent companies in South Africa with many years of experience in providing their clients with high-performance, stable hosting at an affordable price.

MyBroadband analysed the most affordable packages available from six highly reputed providers — 1-Grid, Absolute Hosting, Afrihost, Axxess, Domains.co.za, and Xneelo — to see how they compared.

The cheapest option overall was Absolute Hosting’s cPanel NVMe Silver product, which is R25 per month.

The Centurion-headquartered company is focused specifically on small businesses.

It was the first to offer website hosting storage on NVMe SSDs in South Africa through its services in Africa Data Centres’ Samrand facility.

At the time of publication, Absolute Hosting boasted a 4.5 out 5 star rating from 257 Google reviews.

Its entry-level package is a bare-bones offering but will be sufficient for many small businesses’ needs.

The cPanel Silver product includes unlimited monthly traffic, 500MB of online storage, 10 email accounts, one domain, one SQL database, and a free site builder.

Absolute Hosting also offers two other highly affordable packages — cPanel NVMe Palladium and cPanel NVMe Osmium — for R39 and R60 per month, respectively.

The Palladium package doubles storage and increases MySQL databases to five, while Osmium supports 5GB storage, two domains, 40 email accounts, 10 MySQL databases, and a free co.za domain registration.

The next most affordable hosting provider is Axxess, which has been in the industry since the late 1990s.

Its website hosting services are currently priced from R59 per month on the Linux shared hosting Axxess XS product.

The biggest advantage of this product over Absolute Hosting’s packages is its 75 email accounts and a free co.za domain registration.

For the most storage under R100 per month, Domains.co.za’s Web Hosting Basic product offers 25GB of space.

However, a site builder is sold separately for R39 per month.

The table below compares the features of the most affordable website hosting packages from major providers.

All packages support unlimited traffic and include free SSL certificates.