Insights / Pricing
What website maintenance costs in Kenya, and what you should get
Devaltech · · 5 min read
A website is not finished at launch. Software ages, certificates expire, a form stops sending and nobody notices for a month. Maintenance is the work that stops that, and its price in Kenya varies more than almost anything else on a quote. Published plans from local hosts and agencies run from about KES 2,000 to KES 15,000 a month, with hosting billed separately. The gap is not the work. It is what each plan leaves out.
What a plan should include
Whatever the price, ask for these in writing: automatic backups you can restore from, and how long they are kept; software updates to the platform and its plugins, applied and tested rather than left to run; uptime monitoring that alerts a person; security scanning; and a monthly note of what was done. Cheaper plans tend to stop at updates and backups. Dearer ones add malware scans, a response time for emergencies, and content edits.
The line most often missing is changes. A plan that covers updates but charges for every edit to a phone number or a price list is not maintenance. It is a hosting bill with a longer name.
The cheapest plan is the one that includes the change you will actually ask for next month.
Hosting is a separate line
Shared hosting in Kenya starts at a few hundred shillings a month when billed annually. That is fine for a small brochure site and a problem for a store or anything with traffic. Check where it is hosted, whether the plan includes a free certificate, and how much the price rises at renewal, which is where many cheap plans catch people out.
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Why the platform changes the bill
WordPress sites need frequent updates because they run on a stack of third-party plugins, each of which can break or be compromised. That is most of what a WordPress maintenance fee pays for. A site built on a framework with a small, fixed set of dependencies has far less to patch, and the monthly cost reflects that. It is one of the quieter reasons a custom build can cost less to own than a theme.
What it costs here
A domain is KES 1,000 a year. Standard hosting with SSL and daily backups is KES 6,000 a year, and managed hosting with monitoring and security updates is KES 12,000 a year. Ongoing website maintenance is KES 3,000 a month from, for sites that need regular changes; the full list is on the pricing page. You own the domain and the hosting account in your own name either way, so you can leave without asking anyone's permission.
The test for any quote, here or elsewhere: ask what happens on the day something breaks, who is told, how fast, and what it costs you. If the answer is vague, the price is not the problem.