Every hosting review I read for two years was written in a currency that is not mine. "$2.99 a month" means nothing when your card is debited in rands and the bank adds a cross-border fee on top. So here is the actual arithmetic of running two sites from South Africa, in the numbers that leave my account.
The line nobody puts in the review
The published price is not the price. For a rand-denominated account, a dollar subscription carries three extras:
- The exchange rate at settlement, which is whatever the card network decides that day, not the rate on the pricing page.
- A cross-border or international transaction fee, typically 2-3% on South African cards.
- A minimum charge floor, which matters when the item is $2.99.
My bank charges roughly R15 to R25 per international transaction in fees and markup. On a R89 plan that is noise. On a $2.99 plan billed monthly, it is around a fifth of the cost again.
The fix is boring and effective: pay annually where the discount exists, and treat the fee as a fixed cost per transaction rather than a percentage. One debit a year at 3% is smaller than twelve debits with minimum charges.
What I actually pay
Two domains and one shared hosting plan:
| Item | Cost | Currency | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Business plan | R89/month | ZAR | billed on a long cycle, so the fee is paid once |
| .com domain | ~$12/year | USD | renews annually |
| .site domain | ~$8/year | USD | renews annually |
| CDN and edge worker | $0 | - | free tier, well inside limits |
Monthly, in rands, the total lands around R30 for the domains and R89 for hosting, so roughly R120 a month to keep both sites alive, before any AI tooling.
That number is the one to internalise, because it sets the floor on what this has to earn. R120 is not a business expense you can ignore, but it is also small enough that one affiliate conversion a quarter covers a year of it.
Where the money actually goes
Hosting is the cheapest part of running an online business. This is the part the "$2.99 hosting" articles get backwards.
My real monthly spend splits roughly:
- Hosting and domains: R120
- AI tooling credits: $20-30 (R360-540)
- Everything else: zero, because I built instead of bought
So hosting is under a fifth of the cost. The expensive line is the tooling that writes and automates, not the server that serves.
The expiry trap that almost cost me a site
My first hosting plan had a one-year term. I forgot the renewal date. The site went down mid-week and I found out from a reader, not from my host.
Two things came out of that: a calendar reminder seven days before any renewal, and an uptime monitor that pings both sites and messages me when either fails. The monitor is free. The lesson was not.
What I would tell someone starting the same way
Pay annually for the hosting plan if the discount is real, because you pay the transaction fee once. Keep the domains on auto-renew and set a reminder anyway. Budget the AI credits honestly instead of discovering them mid-month, because a plan that looks like $16 a month does not stay at $16 once you use it.
And write down your actual monthly cost in your own currency. Not the marketing price. The number that leaves the account. If a plan is not worth its rand cost, it is not worth defending because it was cheap in dollars.
Originally published on my diary: Cheap Hosting in Rands: The ZAR Reality Nobody Writes About
