BuildFirstSite
Web design & development · Australia
Short answer: $0 to about $65 AUD a month for a small business website, and a large share of Australian businesses are paying at the top of that range for something they could get free. Here is every number, checked in September 2026.
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Get a fixed quoteBook a free call| Package | Scope | Delivery | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter A credible presence, live in a week. | 3–5 pages | 5–7 days | $800 |
| Business Room to explain everything you do. | Up to 10 pages | 2–3 weeks | $1,900 |
Ongoing Care + SEO is $250/month — optional, cancel with 30 days notice. See all pricing →
All prices AUD · GST not included · You own the code
For a typical Australian small business website, hosting costs $0 to $65 AUD per month. Where you land depends almost entirely on what the site is built with, not on how good it is.
Everything below breaks those numbers down. All figures are AUD and were checked in September 2026 — platform pricing changes, so treat them as a guide and check the provider before you commit.
The honest version is that "hosting" now means two different things, and conflating them is why people get confused by the price range.
That distinction is the whole game. A $50 a month Squarespace bill is not $50 of hosting. It is a few cents of hosting and $50 of software rental.
Multiply by twelve, but watch for two things that catch people out.
Annual billing discounts. Most platforms cut 20-30% for paying yearly. Squarespace Business is about $40/month billed monthly and about $28/month billed annually — roughly $144 a year difference for the same product.
Introductory pricing that expires. This is the big one in Australian shared hosting, and it is covered in the WordPress section below.
Yes — properly free, not a trial. If your site is a static build or a modern framework like Next.js, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages both host it at no cost, with SSL, a global CDN and automatic deployments included.
This is not a loophole or a downgrade. It is how a large share of the modern web is served. The free tiers are generous enough that most small business sites will never approach the limits — Cloudflare Pages, for instance, allows 500 builds a month with unlimited static requests and unlimited bandwidth, no card required.
What free hosting cannot do is run WordPress, or anything else that needs a database and PHP running constantly. That is the real reason most Australian small businesses pay for hosting: not that hosting costs money, but that WordPress costs money to host.
Every site we build is deployed on a free tier by default, and the first year is included regardless. See pricing.
Free for personal and small business projects on the Hobby tier. The Pro tier is US$20 per month per seat with 1TB of bandwidth, which almost no small business site needs. Built for Next.js and React. This is where we deploy by default.
Free, with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited static requests on the free plan and 500 builds a month. Dynamic functions draw on Cloudflare Workers limits (100,000 requests a day free). Excellent for static sites and a genuine alternative to Vercel.
Here is where the advertised price and the real price separate, and it is worth knowing before you sign up.
Read that table twice. SiteGround's introductory rate can rise to nearly ten times itself when the first term ends. That is not a scam — the renewal price is published — but it is disclosed in a way most buyers miss, and it is the single most common unpleasant surprise in Australian small business hosting. VentraIP, an Australian-owned host, renews close to its advertised rate.
If you are comparing hosting, ask for the renewal price, not the first-year price.
Business-capable plans run roughly $21 to $55 AUD per month, with e-commerce on the Business plan at about $46. Hosting is included and cannot be separated from the subscription. You do not get the code.
Roughly $17 to $62 AUD per month depending on plan and billing cycle. The Business plan is about $40 monthly or $28 on annual billing. Same arrangement as Wix — hosting is bundled, the site is not portable.
Basic is about $52 AUD per month monthly, or about $42 on annual billing. Grow is around $149 and Advanced around $575. Transaction fees apply on top unless you use Shopify Payments. For a store turning over real money the subscription is often the smaller half of what you pay Shopify.
$50 to $200+ AUD per month, and it needs someone who can administer it. Correct for high-traffic applications and complete overkill for a brochure site. If someone is quoting you AWS for a five-page business website, ask why.
For a typical Australian small business — five to ten pages, a contact form, a few thousand visitors a month — the honest answer is $0 if the site is built properly, and $10 to $65 a month if it is on WordPress or a page builder.
Over five years that difference is between nothing and roughly $600 to $3,900. It is the single largest avoidable line in the cost of owning a website, and almost nobody raises it at quote stage because the people quoting are usually the people billing it.
Hosting is one line of several. Here is the complete picture so nothing surprises you later.
Two of those are worth a second look. SSL should never be a line item — it has been free since Let's Encrypt launched. And backups are not a product if your site lives in version control; every change is already a restore point.
It depends entirely on what you are paying for, and this is the question people ask too late.
The domain is separate and matters just as much: if the domain lapses, the name can be registered by someone else. Keep it in your own account with auto-renew on, whoever builds your site.
It is used loosely, so here is the concrete test. You own your website if you can take it to another developer tomorrow without asking anyone's permission. That requires four things:
If any of those sit with the provider rather than you, you are renting. That is a legitimate arrangement if you understand it, and it is what most Australian web companies sell — but it should be a decision rather than something you discover when you try to leave.
Everything we build hands over all four on launch day. That is the whole argument, and it is spelled out on the five-year cost page.
Sometimes easily, sometimes not at all.
The last row is the one to watch in Australia. Several established web companies here build on their own CMS and host it themselves, which is rarely disclosed at quote stage and means the site can never leave. Ask the question directly: "If I want to move to another developer in two years, what exactly do I take with me?" The platform-by-platform trade-offs are in Wix vs custom and WordPress vs custom.
A realistic first-year total for a small business site, comparing the two common paths.
On year one alone the platform wins, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The case for a custom build is not the first year. Build prices are published in full on the pricing page, and what a website costs in Australia covers the wider market.
This is the comparison that matters, and the one nobody puts on a pricing page.
The crossover usually lands somewhere in year two or three. After that the custom build is cheaper every month, and it stays yours.
Work it out for whatever quote you are holding: build price + (monthly fee × 60) + the cost of rebuilding if you ever need to leave. If a provider will not tell you the monthly fee, or cannot say what happens to your site if you stop paying it, you have your answer.
For a small business site in Australia, $0 to about $65 AUD a month. A static or Next.js build hosts free on Vercel or Cloudflare Pages indefinitely at normal small business traffic. WordPress needs paid hosting, typically $9 to $65 a month. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify bundle hosting into a subscription of roughly $17 to $575 a month depending on the platform and plan.
Free for modern static sites, and $9 to $65 AUD a month for WordPress on Australian shared hosting. The wide range is mostly about what the site is built with rather than how good the hosting is. Watch renewal pricing: some hosts advertise around $7 a month and renew at $27 to $65.
Hosting and domain together run $10 to $800 AUD a year depending on the platform. A custom-built site on a free tier costs about $10 to $20 a year for the domain alone. A Squarespace or Wix site runs $210 to $680 a year. A Shopify store starts around $630 a year before transaction fees.
Yes. Vercel and Cloudflare Pages both host static and modern JavaScript sites free, with SSL and a global CDN included, and the limits are generous enough that most small business sites never reach them. The catch is that free hosting cannot run WordPress, which needs a database and PHP. So the honest framing is not that hosting costs money — it is that WordPress costs money to host.
If you genuinely own it — domain, code and hosting in your name — the ongoing cost can be as low as $10 to $20 AUD a year for the domain. Everything above that is either a platform subscription, paid hosting for a technology that requires it, or an optional maintenance arrangement. Owning a website is cheap; renting one is not.
On a platform like Wix or Squarespace the site goes offline within days and cannot be exported as a working site. On traditional hosting the site goes offline but you keep the files and can move them. If the site is in a repository you own, nothing is lost and you can redeploy elsewhere in under an hour. Separately, if the domain lapses someone else can register it, so keep the domain in your own account with auto-renew on.
Building one does. Running one need not. The domain is unavoidable at roughly $10 to $20 a year for a .com.au, and SSL is free. Beyond that, whether you pay monthly depends entirely on what the site is built with — a static build costs nothing to keep online, a WordPress or page-builder site costs $10 to $65 a month indefinitely.
Australian-owned hosts like VentraIP start around $8.95 a month and renew close to that. International hosts selling into Australia often advertise from about $6.99 and renew between $26.99 and $64.99. Modern static hosting on Vercel or Cloudflare is free. Always compare the renewal price rather than the introductory one.
Between $0 and $65 AUD a month for a typical small business site, plus about $1 a month amortised for the domain. Optional extras are business email at $0 to $10 per user and maintenance at $0 to $250 a month. Our Care + SEO plan is $250 a month and is entirely optional — nothing stops working if you do not take it.
Tell us what the business needs to do and we will send back a written scope with a fixed AUD price within one business day.
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