What Web Hosting Really Costs in Australia

The number that matters when you compare web hosting is not the advertised price. It is what the site costs you in year two, with the domain, the certificate and the mailboxes counted. Most hosting comparisons stop at the first figure, which is exactly why so many people find out in month thirteen that the plan they chose doubles at renewal, charges per mailbox, or bills the certificate separately.

This page is about how to work that number out properly, whatever host you are looking at, including us.

Start with the four items that decide the annual cost

1. The price you actually pay, for the term you actually buy. A monthly price and an annual price are not the same number with twelve in front of it. Look at the term you will commit to, and the total charged at checkout, not the monthly equivalent of a long prepaid term.

2. The renewal price. This is the one that decides whether the deal was real. A first year at a discount is a normal marketing practice. A renewal at two or three times the introductory rate is the thing to look for, and it is usually stated somewhere below the fold, or in the terms rather than the pricing table.

3. What is inside the plan and what is billed beside it. The items that move the annual figure most are business email, backups, and the SSL certificate. Any of them can be inside a plan or added to an invoice. None of them can be left out if the site and the business are to actually function.

4. What happens when you exceed a limit. Some hosts slow your site, some charge for overage, and some suspend it. Site speed problems at peak traffic are usually a resource limit being reached rather than a technical fault, and the invoice for fixing it is often a plan upgrade.

What hosting costs here, itemised

For reference, these are our own current figures, verified 11 October 2026. Use them as one data point in the comparison.

All prices shown exclude GST. Prices are in AUD.

The full plan breakdown, including capacity per tier, is on our web hosting costs in Australia page.

Why "cheap" hosting can cost more

Cheap hosting is cheap because of limits. That is not a moral judgement, it is the mechanism: a host selling a plan for a few dollars a month is selling very little disk space, memory and CPU, usually on a server shared with many other accounts. Four limits matter, and only two of them are normally published.

The commercial consequence is simple. If the plan you bought cannot serve the site you have, the fix is either a migration to a bigger plan or a migration to another host, and both cost more in time than the monthly difference ever saved.

How to compare two quotes properly

1. Take the price for the term you will pay, not the monthly equivalent of a three year prepayment.
2. Find the renewal price. If it is not published, ask, and treat the answer as part of the offer.
3. Add the domain, the certificate and the mailboxes if they are not inside the plan.
4. Ask what the disk, memory, CPU and inode limits are, and what happens on overage.
5. Multiply to a single annual figure, then compare the annual figures.

Doing that across three hosts usually changes the ranking, and it is worth the ten minutes. The plan that looked cheapest rarely stays cheapest once the mailboxes and the renewal are in the total.

Frequently asked questions

Is there such a thing as cheap web hosting that is fine? Yes. If the site is small, the traffic is modest and the limits are published, a low cost plan can be a sensible choice. It becomes a problem when the limits are unpublished and the site grows into them.

Should I prepay for three years to get the lowest monthly price? Only if the host has earned it. Prepaying locks you in and moves the risk to you: if the service is poor in month four, that money is not coming back. Prepaying a host you already use is a different decision.

Are there setup fees? Not on our plans. Where a host charges one, it belongs in the annual total alongside everything else.

Do I need to pay for email separately? Not with us. Unlimited mailboxes are included in the plan. With hosts that charge per mailbox, the email line is often the biggest item in the second year's invoice.

Is GST included in the prices? No. The prices on our site exclude GST, and GST is added at the rate that applies to your purchase. Every price table on this page carries the exclusion label, so the figures you see are the pre-GST amounts.

Does a more expensive plan make my site faster? Up to a point, and only if a limit is the cause. A slow site is usually a site problem (images, caching, a plugin stack) before it is a plan problem. Moving up a plan fixes contention and limit problems, not unoptimised pages.

See the real numbers

Our own plans, their capacity and what each includes are listed on the hosting cost page, including the figures we have not hidden in a footnote. If you want to check any of them against your current invoice, that is the point of publishing them.

Primary action: See what our plans cost, itemised