Pricing
Four plans. No hidden fees, no egress charges, no traffic limits. Every plan includes the full feature set.
Personal sites, docs, and landing pages.
Real blogs and small business sites with growing traffic.
Media-heavy sites and small teams that need headroom.
Mission-critical sites that don't share resources with anyone.
Everything included on every plan
No tiers within tiers. The cheapest plan and the most expensive plan get the same features — only the compute resources differ.
- Assigned subdomain on em-dash.app (free)
- Free SSL on subdomain and custom domains
- Unlimited custom domains
- Daily automatic backups (7-day retention)
- Pre-update backups (30-day retention)
- Manual backups on demand
- One-click restore + download as .tar.gz
- Stripe-hosted billing portal
- Every DigitalOcean region (9 total)
What do these resource limits mean?
Each plan's CPU, RAM, and disk limits are enforced as Docker cgroup caps. A site on the Starter plan gets 512 MB of RAM — exactly that, no more. A noisy neighbour on the same droplet can't eat into your allocation.
For a typical EmDash site (a blog, docs site, or small business landing page), 512 MB RAM is plenty. EmDash is an Astro-native CMS — it's not running a Node server per request, and rendered pages are fast and light.
If your site is media-heavy or serves a lot of concurrent editors, step up to Business or Dedicated. The Dedicated plan gives you your own DigitalOcean droplet with no shared neighbours at all.
Billing details
Stripe-hosted billing
All payment processing goes through Stripe. You can view invoices, update your card, and manage subscriptions from Stripe's hosted portal — linked from your account page.
Per-site subscriptions
Each site is its own Stripe subscription. Add more sites later; they all flow through the same saved card. Cancel one without affecting the others.
14-day grace period
If a payment fails, your site is suspended but not deleted. You have 14 days to resolve the payment issue. Data is preserved throughout the grace window.
Cancel any time
Delete a site and the subscription cancels immediately. No lock-in, no proration refund. Your data is gone; download a backup first if you want it.
"Host Local" on your statement
Host Local is the legal entity behind EmDash Hosting. Charges appear as "Host Local" on your credit card statement so you can recognise them.
No traffic or egress limits
We don't meter bandwidth or throttle traffic. You pay for compute (CPU, RAM, disk). The amount of traffic your site serves isn't part of the bill.
Start with Starter, upgrade when you need to
You can change plans at any time from your site's dashboard.
Get started