What a Web Hosting Service Really Costs an Australian Business Per Year
Our own website runs on a hosting plan that cost $100 for three years. That is about $2.80 a month, the $3 plan everyone warns you about. Add the domain at $20 a year and the bill comes to $160 over three years, or about $53 a year. So far it has been fine.
The warning is still worth hearing, just aimed at the right thing. On 19 October 2026 we read the plan pages of four hosting providers that sell to Australian businesses. In year one, every entry plan cost between $53 and $66. Once the offer ends, the same plans cost between $108 and $356 a year. Same website, same host, no upgrade. The cheap plan is not the problem. The renewal invoice is.
Key Takeaways
For a typical small business website (a few service pages, a contact form, a blog that gets a post now and then) the honest answer is $50 to $70 a year in the first term and $108 to $356 a year after it, at the four hosts we checked.
That range is for shared hosting, where your site sits on a server with many others and the host manages the machine. A shared hosting plan is the right type of hosting for most small business sites, and it is the only one we price here. Other guides on this topic spend pages on VPS hosting, cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. They are real options, but they solve problems a ten-page site does not have. We come back to when you need them further down.
Two other lines belong on the same bill. A domain name costs us 9.90 per user per month on an annual plan, before tax (Google Workspace pricing page, retrieved 9 October 2026).
Here is what we pay to keep our studio’s website online. The figures come from our invoices.
There is one thing we do not know yet: the renewal price. The $100 covered the first term, and hosts often charge more when a term ends. If ours does, our yearly figure goes up with it, and we will say so. That uncertainty is the whole point of this article. Every cheap plan is cheap for a fixed period. What it costs after that period is written on the plan page, usually in smaller type, and it is the number to compare.
On 19 October 2026 we opened the web hosting plan pages of four hosting providers that sell to Australian businesses, in a browser set to Australia, and recorded each entry plan exactly as listed. We did not log in or start a checkout.
None of this is hidden. Each web host prints the renewal price or the normal price next to the offer. The offer is in large type and the renewal is not, and it is easy to compare the large type and stop there.
Hostinger and Crazy Domains also tie the price to the term in ways worth reading twice. Hostinger’s headline price needs a four-year commitment. Crazy Domains goes the other way: on the same plan, a three-year term costs $7.50 a month and a one-year term $5.45. Paying for longer is not always the cheaper choice.
You will almost certainly keep the website longer than the introductory offer lasts. So the useful question is not ‘what does hosting cost this year?’ but ‘what will this plan cost over the life of the site?’
We added up six years on each entry plan, assuming you buy today and renew at the listed price.
In year one, these four plans sat within $13 of each other. Over six years, the most expensive costs three times the cheapest, about $1,255 more for the same site. All of that gap opens at renewal.
Before you compare prices, compare what each price buys. The four entry plans are closer than their renewal prices suggest, and most of the features sold as extras elsewhere are already on the list.
Each plan also carries a money-back guarantee: 30 days at Hostinger and SiteGround, 45 days at VentraIP, 60 days at Crazy Domains. Read what it covers before you rely on it, because the hosting may be refundable while other lines on the same order are not.
Renewal is the big jump in hosting fees. The smaller ones come from lines that were free in year one and quietly start billing in year two.
On Hostinger’s plan page, the domain is ‘free for 1 year’ and so are the two mailboxes per website. After the first year the mailboxes renew at A$0.89 a month each, and the domain is billed at the normal rate. Neither is a large amount. But a business that budgeted for ‘free domain and email included’ gets three new invoice lines in the second year.
GST is the other gap. SiteGround lists its Australian prices excluding GST, so the price you see is 10% below the price you pay. A business registered for GST can usually claim that back. A small business that is not registered cannot. Our own studio is not registered for GST, so for a business like ours the 10% is a real cost. On SiteGround’s StartUp renewal it adds about $32 a year.
At checkout, look out for add-ons that are ticked by default or offered as ‘recommended’: extra backups, malware scanning, a premium SSL certificate, domain privacy. Some are worth having. But as the list above shows, all four plans already include a free SSL certificate and most include backups, so read what the plan covers before you pay for it twice.
The billing term can change the price more than the plan does. Each host ties its lowest advertised rate to one particular term. At Hostinger that is 48 months; at Crazy Domains it is one year. Paying for a long term up front makes sense when two things are true:
If you are not sure about either, a one-year term keeps you free to move. VentraIP and Crazy Domains both show their offer on a one-year term. You can try the host for a year at the introductory rate, then decide with the renewal price in front of you.
Not every business sees a separate hosting invoice. Two common setups fold the web hosting cost into something else, and both are worth pulling apart.
The first is a website builder. GoDaddy’s Australian guide lists its Website Builder, hosting included, from $15.95 a month, against shared hosting and WordPress hosting from $6.95 a month (GoDaddy, What website hosting costs in Australia, retrieved 19 October 2026). On those figures the builder costs at least $191 a year, and you are paying for the editor as much as for the hosting. That is a fair trade if you build and update the site yourself. It is an expensive way to host a site somebody else built.
The second is a hosting package from your web designer, often bundled with updates in a monthly care plan. There is nothing wrong with that arrangement if you use the support. Ask what part of the fee is hosting, which hosting provider sits underneath it and whose name the account is in. If the answer is ‘ours’, moving later will depend on their goodwill.
That is how we set up our own fixed-price website packages: the domain is registered in the client’s business name, the hosting account is in their name and paid on their card, and the hosting is paid to the host directly, at about $50 a year, rather than folded into a monthly fee.
Usually not. The entry plans we checked list from 5 GB to 20 GB of storage, and the Crazy Domains Economy plan is rated for about 20,000 visits a month by the host’s own estimate. A service business website with ten pages and a few hundred visits a week uses a small share of that, so its hosting needs stay small too.
A bigger plan, managed hosting for WordPress or a VPS, starts to make sense when the site does something heavy on every visit and the shared web server cannot keep up. GoDaddy’s Australian guide lists VPS hosting from $14.95 a month, which is still modest (GoDaddy, What website hosting costs in Australia, retrieved 19 October 2026). The catch is that a VPS is often unmanaged hosting: the host keeps the machine running, and updates, security and backups are yours or your developer’s. Over a year, that labour usually costs more than the plan.
An online store with a large catalogue, a membership site where every page is personalised, or a booking system that handles payments are the usual cases. On a simple brochure site, slow pages are often caused by oversized images and too many plugins rather than the hosting plan. Check those first, because a bigger plan will not shrink an image.
If the renewal price is the problem, moving is usually cheaper than paying it, and for a small site the move takes an afternoon. Two of the four hosts we checked say so on the plan page: SiteGround lists free site migrations for WordPress sites on StartUp, and VentraIP lists migration tools on its Business plans.
A move that does not take the site or the email offline goes in this order:
The new host’s money-back window gives you a trial period while you do this. That is where the 60 days at Crazy Domains or the 45 days at VentraIP are worth more than the headline price.
You can do this today, whichever host you are with.
For a small service website on shared hosting, about $50 to $70 a year during an introductory term and $108 to $356 a year after it, at the four hosts we checked in October 2026. Our own bill, including the domain, is about $53 a year for the current term.
On the four entry plans we checked, from A$4.39 to $5.50 a month while the offer lasts, and from $9.00 to about $29.69 a month after it. The top figure is SiteGround’s $26.99 plus GST. The monthly figure on the sales page assumes you pay the whole term up front.
Yes, for a small brochure site, if you know the renewal price before you buy. Our own site runs on a plan that cost $100 for three years. Cheap hosting becomes poor value when the renewal is several times the introductory price and nobody notices until the invoice arrives.
Rarely. Even GoDaddy’s own guide warns that free plans ‘often insert advertisements into your website’ and may not let you use your own domain (GoDaddy, What website hosting costs in Australia, retrieved 19 October 2026). For a business, a paid entry plan at about $5 a month is a small price for your own domain, no third-party ads and a support line.
Because the advertised price is a discount for new customers. VentraIP states it plainly: the discount ‘applies to the first invoice of new hosting purchases for up to 1 year only.’ The other hosts we checked print a renewal or normal price beside the offer. That second price is the one you pay for as long as you stay.
Not always. Many hosting plans include email accounts, sometimes free only for the first year. A dedicated service such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 costs more. In return your email stays separate from your website host, and changing hosts later does not touch your mailboxes.
If your hosting renews in the next few months, look up the renewal price today and decide before the invoice does it for you. If you are choosing a web hosting service for a new site, compare six-year totals rather than first-year prices. On the figures above, that one change can be the difference between about $600 and about $1,800 for hosting the same website.
Vasilii Aldukhov runs Web Ways Tech, a Sydney web studio that builds websites for Australian small businesses, with the domain and hosting set up in the client’s own name. The hosting prices in this article were read from each host’s plan page on 19 October 2026 and will change; check the renewal price on the page before you buy.
Build a professional consulting or corporate website with Alexi. Modern design, responsive layouts, and flexible customization—perfect for business, agency, and service websites.
