USD
KES - Kenya
Hosting prices look simple until you compare two quotes and find they are not measuring the same thing. Here is what the money is actually for, and the one thing worth checking before you pay anyone.
What a plan costs
Shared hosting here starts at $11.94 a year, and every plan is listed with what it includes on the web hosting page.
The difference between plans is quantity, not features: how many sites, how much NVMe storage, how much bandwidth. SSL, email, backups, cPanel and Softaculous are on every plan, including the cheapest.
What drives the price up
- Number of websites. One site is the entry plan. Five is a step up
- Storage. A brochure site needs very little; a shop with a thousand product photographs does not
- Traffic. Bandwidth is rarely the binding constraint until it suddenly is
- Resources. A busy WordPress site with a dozen plugins uses more CPU than a static page
- Whether it is shared at all. A VPS from $11.40 a month gives you resources nobody else can touch
Most businesses are comfortable on a shared plan for years. The ones that are not usually know, because the site is slow at busy times no matter what they cache.
The renewal trick
This is the part worth reading twice.
A very low first-year price followed by a much higher renewal is standard practice across this industry. The headline figure gets the sale; the real price arrives twelve months later, when moving is inconvenient and you probably will not.
Our renewal price is our registration price. What you sign up at is what it renews at. When you compare quotes, ask every provider for the renewal figure, not the first-year one — it is the only number that tells you what hosting will actually cost you.
What else is on the bill
| Typical cost | Here | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting plan | Yearly | From $11.94 a year |
| Domain name | Yearly | .com is $13.86 |
| SSL certificate | Often sold separately | Free, on every plan |
| Often per mailbox | Unlimited, included | |
| Backups | Often an add-on | Included |
| Migration | Often charged | Free |
The add-ons are where quotes diverge. A cheap plan that charges separately for SSL, email accounts and backups is not a cheap plan.
When it is worth paying more
You are losing sales to a slow site
Measure first. If the server is the problem, a bigger plan helps. If six megabytes of unresized photographs are the problem, no plan will.
You host for clients
Reseller hosting costs more than a shared plan and gives each client their own cPanel, their own quota and their own logins. Billed to you, priced by you.
You need root
A VPS from $11.40 a month, when you need software a shared account will not let you install.
How to pay less without regretting it
- Pay yearly. Cheaper than monthly nearly everywhere, including here
- Take the free domain included from the second plan up
- Do not buy capacity you do not use. Moving up a plan takes minutes
- Ask. Tell us what the site does and we will say which plan fits — including when the cheapest is enough, which it often is
Paid by card or bank transfer, and there is no setup fee.