A friend of mine pays R2,500 a month for a website he cannot edit. He cannot log into it, he does not know who hosts it, and the guy who built it stopped answering his calls in March. The site works fine today, which is exactly the problem: nothing about it tells you how badly it will fail the day something breaks. This is the story I hear every month or so, and it almost always starts with a bargain quote.
Where the cheap money goes
Cheap web work is cheap for a reason, and the reason is never generosity. Somebody typed a stock template in on a Friday night. The domain is registered in the developer's name, not yours, because that was easier. There is no backup beyond the live server, because backups are a chore. None of this is visible while everything hums along. You find out during a fire: the person who knows how the plumbing works is gone, and the next plumber charges you double to figure out what the first one did.
The bill you see later
Rebuilding a failed bargain site costs more than building it properly the first time, because now there are two jobs: the new site, and rescuing the old one. Rescuing means pulling content out of a server you cannot access, re-registering a domain held hostage under someone else's account, and rebuilding the SEO you quietly had, which the domain loss wipes out. I have watched a R6,000 "saving" turn into a R30,000 recovery, and the business lost a month of enquiries along the way. The maths is not complicated. The mistake is buying the first quote without asking a single question.
What to ask before you sign
Three questions filter out most of it. Who owns the domain and hosting accounts, by name? Ask for your own accounts, paid by card from your own bank, with the developer as a guest. Will you hand over full code and database access if I leave? If the answer is vague, run. And who answers the phone when it breaks at 6pm on a Friday? A real agency has someone; a guy with a side hustle has a excuse. None of this makes web work free. It makes the price honest, and the difference between R5,000 and R25,000 is mostly who absorbs the risk when something goes wrong.
Stuck behind a website you cannot access? We have rescued a few of these. Send us the domain and we will tell you, honestly, whether it can be saved or should be rebuilt.