South African website maintenance typically runs R500–R2,500/month for small business, R5,000–R15,000 for agency-grade care. The gap isn't padding, it's what's actually included underneath the label.
What R500/mo usually covers
Hosting, and maybe basic uptime monitoring. That's a real, useful service, and it's honest about what it is: a hosting plan with a support layer, not a managed operations service.
What tends to be missing at that price
- Backups that have actually been restored and tested, not just taken and assumed to work
- One accountable person who answers, rather than a ticket queue read on Monday
- A stated number of included change hours, rather than a per-edit invoice
- Domain registered in your own name, guaranteed, rather than assumed
The domain-hostage problem, briefly
The single most common website horror story in rescue-guide articles: a domain registered in the developer's name rather than the client's, held for ransom the day the client tries to leave. It costs nothing to check today whether your domain is registered correctly, and it's worth doing regardless of who's hosting you.
The untested-backup problem
"We take backups" and "we can actually restore from a backup" are different claims. An untested backup is a rumour, not a safety net, and the only way to know which one you have is to ask when the last test restore happened.
Choosing the right tier for you
A static site with no forms and no regular changes genuinely doesn't need much beyond solid hosting. A site the business depends on, that changes regularly, or that nobody internally is responsible for, is exactly where the gap between R500 and R3,500/mo stops being padding and starts being the thing that saves you when something breaks.