Best website hosting providers for South African businesses

If you want to be a competitive business in South Africa, there are no two ways about it — you need a high-quality website.

A digital presence opens up a wealth of potentially-lucrative opportunities by allowing customers to gain easy access to your services from wherever the Internet is available.

However, to truly distinguish yourself from rivals, it must perform well and suffer minimal downtime.

Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) don’t have to spend thousands upon thousands of rand on maintaining a solid website by using an expensive international provider that charges in US dollars or other foreign currency.

Numerous website hosting providers in South Africa offer affordable packages ideal for SMEs.

Many of them are highly capable and provide all the features you could need.

Because they are closer to home, you can generally also get faster and more responsive support.

Below are five of the best website hosting companies for SMEs in South Africa.

1-grid

1-grid was originally the hosting division of Internet service provider (ISP) Webafrica, founded in 1997.

The division adopted the name Gridhost following Webafrica’s 2013 takeover of the company by the same name.

In November 2017, it separated from Webafrica’s ISP business and was rebranded to 1-grid to become a specialised web hosting business for SMEs.

Aside from web hosting, 1-grid offers dedicated hosting, domain and company registration, web design, a DIY website builder, and social media marketing.

Its most affordable packages give customers a free co.za, .online., .store, .shop domain for a website, 10GB SSD storage, and 100 email accounts for R89 per month on a WordPress website or R99 on a .NET CMS website.

More  demanding businesses can get the same as the above with unlimited websites, unlimited mail accounts, and 50GB of SSD storage for R269 per month on a WordPress website or R299

1-grid also offers Linux and Windows hosting for resellers.

Absolute Hosting

Absolute Hosting was founded in 2011 by Jade Benson.

Benson previously worked in the managed hosting division of Internet Solutions (IS) before Dimension Data acquired it.

In its early days, Absolute Hosting catered towards resellers and dedicated clients but later shifted its strategy to focus more on end-users, SME hosting, and virtual servers.

It sells Linux, Windows, and WordPress hosting, with respective starting prices of R6.90, R11.50, and R23.00 per month.

One of Absolute Hosting’s standout offerings is high-performance hosting using some of the latest web servers, including some running on AMD’s powerful Epyc Milan processors.

Windows Virtual Private Server (VPS), cPanel Web, and email-only hosting services are also available.

Afrihost

Afrihost’s co-founders, Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong and Peter Meintjes, started experimenting with Linux Web Hosting in the late 1990s.

The company offers seven Linux hosting packages, with monthly pricing starting at R49 per month and going up to R439.

The basic Silver Home Linux package offers customers a free a .co.za, .site, .online, .store, or .tech domain, unlimited web traffic, and 1GB of storage space.

Other features include a MySQL database and 50 email accounts linked to your domain.

Afrihost also sells Windows Shared Hosting products and a range of cloud and specialised hosting services.

Axxess

Axxess was founded by Franco Barbalich, who started selling website hosting and design packages from his one-bedroom apartment in 1997.

Initially called Axxess Africa, it gradually expanded into the ISP space by providing online access at Internet cafés before starting to sell network equipment and broadband packages in the early 2000s.

Axxess now sells a range of hosting packages and services to suit the needs of businesses and individuals, including:

• Linux Shared Web Hosting — R49 to R399 per month
• Windows Shared Web Hosting — R65 to R545 per month
• WordPress Web Hosting — R99 to R439 per month
• Email Only Hosting — R25 to R45 per month
• Linux Cloud Server Hosting — R339 to R1,499 per month
• Registration and parking of domains — R9 to R24 per month

Axxess also offers a free .co.za, .online, .store, or .site domain and SSL certificates for selected web hosting services.

Xneelo

Xneelo’s primary focus is robust and consistent domain hosting, as best illustrated by its promise of 99.9% uptime on its web hosting packages.

It also offers other server-related infrastructure and services.

The company currently supports over half a million websites and has received many awards for its excellent service.

Pricing for Xneelo’s shared web hosting packages starts from R99 for Basic, increasing to R439 for a Master plan.

With its entry-level product, customers get a website with support for unlimited traffic, up to 10 domains, 5GB SSD storage, and 100 mailboxes and email aliases with spam filtering.

Xneelo sells a Managed WordPress product for small online stores at R149 per month.

You can also integrate tools like website security software Cloudbric or the publishing tool SiteBuilder.

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