Hosting guide · South Africa
Managed hosting vs cheap shared hosting: what are you actually paying for?
The useful comparison is not “how many gigabytes do I get?” It is who owns updates, backups, restores, DNS, email and support when your business depends on the website.
Published · Written for South African small and medium businesses.
The short answer
Low-cost shared hosting can be perfectly sensible for a small static site when somebody in the business knows how to manage it. Managed hosting becomes valuable when the cost of missed enquiries, failed email, an unpatched website or a slow recovery is larger than the monthly saving.
“Managed” is not a universal technical standard. Treat it as a claim that must be unpacked into named responsibilities, limits and evidence.
Compare responsibility, not labels
| Question | Self-service/shared hosting | A useful managed service |
|---|---|---|
| Software updates | Usually your responsibility | Schedule, ownership and exclusions are stated |
| Backups | May exist, but you must understand retention and restore access | Frequency, retention and restore procedure are agreed |
| Monitoring | Often infrastructure-level only | Website, SSL or service checks and escalation are defined |
| DNS and email | Control panels and documentation | A named party owns changes, records and troubleshooting |
| Recovery | Tools may be available for you to operate | Who restores what, from which backup and within what support window is clear |
| Content changes | Normally excluded | Only included if a specific allowance is published or contracted |
Six questions to ask any provider
- Who owns the domain and DNS account? Your business should retain appropriate ownership and recovery access.
- What exactly is backed up? Files, databases, mailboxes and DNS configuration are different assets.
- How long are backups retained? A backup overwritten after the compromise began may not give you a clean recovery point.
- Has a restore been tested? A successful backup job is not the same thing as a successful recovery.
- What does monitoring detect? Server availability, website response, certificate expiry and application health are not interchangeable.
- What happens outside the package? Get migration, malware cleanup, redesign, new pages and after-hours response boundaries in writing.
NIST’s guidance for managed service providers specifically emphasises planning, maintaining and testing backup files. That is a better question than simply asking whether backups are “included”.
When shared hosting is enough
Choose a straightforward shared plan when the website is low-risk, changes rarely, has no unusual application dependencies, and your team is comfortable owning updates, monitoring and recovery. Keep the domain in a business-controlled account, record every DNS change and maintain an independent copy of important content.
When managed hosting earns its keep
Managed hosting makes more sense when the site produces leads or revenue, nobody internally owns the technical work, email and DNS changes need coordination, or the application needs regular maintenance and a documented recovery path.
Ecommerce and database-backed applications should be scoped separately. Traffic patterns, dependencies, recovery objectives, payment integrations and support exposure cannot be responsibly inferred from a generic website package.
Want the responsibilities made clear?
Arlow’s fixed hosting plans cover straightforward business websites. Application hosting follows a review and written proposal so the infrastructure and support boundaries match the workload.