Saving on monthly AFRIHOST bills

[UPDATE: The following only holds true for accounts 5GB and smaller. A 10GB account is R19 per GB, but with R29 per GB top-up after that. So this is now only really applicable for 1,2,3,4,5GB accounts]

Many people subscribe to AFRIHOST because of their (currently) competitive per GB pricing at R29 per GB.

What many subscribers don't seem to realise is that it doesn't pay to subscribe to any account over 1GB, because whether it is 2GB @ R58pm, 5GB @ R145pm, or even 20GB @ R380pm, it still works out at exactly R29 per GB.

The benefit of going the cheaper route of 1GB per month is that you're only tying yourself down to 1GB per month: that means if you don't use bandwidth (i.e. TELKOM is down [again] or you're away on holiday) you're only debited for R29 for the month. If you are doing a higher bandwidth deal, you're being charged the full amount regardless of usage, and there's absolutely no need for this!

AFRIHOST offers an automatic top-up facility (interestingly, this was implemented 3 days after I emailed them about putting this feature in, so they took my comments seriously and responded - another big feather in their cap from my perspective) which enables you to set the limit (and size of your top-up increments) up to 20GB for recaps every month, and this method of, for example, 1GB plus 19*1GB top-ups achieves the same net effect (and total cost) as buying a full 20GB account up front but without the committed cost implications at the beginning of the month JUST IN CASE you don't use it all.

Let me simplify this:

• Buying 20GB @ R380pm means you are committing the R380 to AFRIHOST every month REGARDLESS of what amount of the 20GB you use - 0.1GB, 2GB, 5GB, 9.3GB will all end up costing you R380 for the month and there is no carry-over of your bandwidth so what you don't use is thrown away completely.
  
• Buying 1GB @ R29pm means you are only committing to R29 to AFRIHOST every month REGARDLESS of whether you use 0.1GB, 0.5GB, or 0.9999GB.
• The real savings come in when you employ the AUTO-TOP-UP feature on the 1GB account, and set the top-up to do 1GB at R29 each time, up to a number of times that you specify (for example, if you are a 5GB subscriber, you'd set it to automatically top-up only four more times at 1GB a time).

This allows you to still get up to the total bandwidth you want every month without any interruptions to your browsing, but with the luxury of knowing that if you don't use it, you don't pay for it (in the 5GB example above, if you used 2.8GB you'd save R29*2 for that month because you wouldn't buy the 4th or 5th GB).

So what are all of you 2GB and higher AFRIHOST subscribers waiting for? Go and downgrade your contract and enable automatic top-ups instead! You'll save yourself money in the long run and it won't possibly cost you anything more than your current bills are DEFINITELY costing you every month!