Website Hosting South Africa
When it comes to choosing the best web hosting in South Africa, these are the options that we think provide the best overall value.
We realise that many of the web hosts in South Africa offer similar features, packages, pricing & support, making it difficult to choose the best hosting company.
Therefore, we’ve created this web hosting comparison to help you make an informed decision when it comes to finding a reliable & secure home for your new website or blog.
Web Hosting Comparison Of Hosting Companies in South Africa
Due to the wide range of criteria available to measure these hosting companies in South Africa, we’ve decided to base this web hosting comparison on the areas that matter most.
Whilst focusing only on these key areas, it will make it less confusing and easier for you to choose the best option for web hosting in South Africa.
Furthermore, this comparison of hosting companies in South Africa will help you see which is the cheapest, which is the most supportive, and which is best web hosting package for you.
We’ve compared the Afrihost hosting packages against those of Hostgator SA & A2 Hosting, even though the latter web hosts have their servers located in the US.
If you’re concerned about page speed & website loading performance we address this below.
Furthermore, this site is hosted on a shared HostGator plan & it’s page speed, in South Africa (no CDN), is surprisingly fast.
Web Hosting Comparison Chart 2020
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly On These Hosting Companies in South Africa
Not everything can be highlighted in tabular format, so we’ve done some more research to reveal some of the good, the bad and the ugly about these web hosts in South Africa.
Afrihost Hosting Packages
1. SSL Certificate
Upon checking to see whether a free SSL certificate is included in the Afrihost hosting packages, we discovered this in their hosting FAQ…
Q: Are there any extra costs involved in hosting a secure site (i.e. having a SSL certificate)?
A: Yes, you’ll need to get a digital certificate from a Certificate Authority such as VeriSign or Thawte. This will be an additional cost over and above your hosting fee. Please contact us if you need to set up your SSL certificate.
2. Web Hosting or Fibre?
Take a look at Afrihost’s home page and you wouldn’t think that they’re in the web host business or that they offer hosting packages.
In fact you would be excused for thinking that their core business has changed from specialising in hosting packages to fibre, data & mobile.
Furthermore, to get more information, or to view Afrihost’s hosting packages, you would need to click the “Hosting” link in the top menu bar or in the footer.
I’m not suggesting that Afrihost’s hosting packages and support is affected by this, however it could be something to consider.
I know I would rather choose a web host that is dedicated to providing excellent hosting, combined with 24/7 support, rather than one that’s diversifying into other fields placing their commitment to web hosting under question.
3. Support
Talking about support, we have also picked up a few service related complaints regarding Afrihost’s support and service.
Take a look at these screenshots…
This was posted on: https://hostadvice.com/hosting-company/afrihost-reviews/
This one, together with many other complaints about Afrihost’s service, can be seen on: https://www.hellopeter.com/afri-host-com
More from this forum: https://mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/afrihost-complaint-email-to-gian-visser.954727/
To be fair, some of these complaints aren’t specifically related to just Afrihost hosting packages, but also to Afrihost fibre services.
4. Uptime
Despite their servers being located in South Africa, I don’t see this as a massive benefit, in fact it could be a massive disadvantage.
It’s almost a certainty that load shedding will continue, which will place a huge strain on any power backup that Afrihost may have in place to keep your sites online.
Furthermore, during the last intense phase of load shedding, even the big cellular network operators were struggling to keep their networks up, which will be the same for any SA based web servers.
So no matter whether Afrihost boasts a 99.9% uptime rate, there’s nothing they can do when they’re starved of power to run their servers, the consequence of which will be that your website will be down & viewable to nobody.
This undesirable situation, will of course, not affect your website if it’s hosted on state of the art servers in high tech data centres in the US.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting South Africa has a pretty good reputation as far as I can see.
I’ve used the same criteria to dredge up any bad publicity or complaints and can only come up with the following.
1. A2 Hosting Reviews
This is from the same review site as for Afrihost above: https://hostadvice.com/hosting-company/a2-hosting-reviews/
2. Complaints or Support Issues
HostGator Hosting
HostGator is a popular web host in South Africa, however it doesn’t rate as well as A2 Hosting above.
This despite me having used Hostgator’s shared hosting plans for more than 10 years without any real problems.
In fact I’ve always had quick professional support for when I’ve had websites down, or technical issues.
I’ve also found all their up to date features, tools and applications, user friendly & really useful.
However, this is what I’ve found.
1. Reviews
This is from: https://hostadvice.com/hosting-company/hostgator-reviews/
2. Complaints or Support Issues
Conclusion On Choosing the Best Web Hosting In South Africa
In my humble opinion too much is made of having your site hosted on a server located in South Africa for a SA based websites.
The main reason cited for this is page loading speed.
Well this site, which is hosted on a shared Hostgator plan, boasts a GTMetrix page speed of just 2.7s without it being on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which would make it even quicker for any international location.
To wrap it up, it’s your choice but I know I would choose a company that I can trust to keep my website online 24/7 and one that is dedicated to providing the best web hosting experience for anyone anywhere.