Surprising results follow MWEB Uncapped hosting launch

In March 2010 MWEB surprised the broadband market when it launched South Africa’s first affordable uncapped ADSL products.

A year later MWEB complemented its uncapped ADSL products with affordable uncapped hosting, offering consumers unlimited hosting space coupled with unlimited traffic for R19 per month.

MWEB further announced that MWEB ADSL customers will get the newly launched MWEB Uncapped Hosting service for free for the first year.

Many people expected large consumer and small business focused hosting providers such as Hetzner, Afrihost and Web Africa to quake in their boots, but this was not the case.

Unlike MWEB’s uncapped ADSL services which attracted immediate responses from competitors with competing offerings, many hosting providers simply congratulated MWEB on this initiative and continued with business as usual.

The general feeling among SA’s largest hosting providers was that MWEB’s uncapped hosting offering would not see a mass migration to the ISP as when it launched uncapped ADSL – and they seem to be correct.

According to the latest Webhosting.info reports, the number of domains hosted by MWEB has actually decreased since their uncapped hosting launch. On the other hand, Hetzner, Afrihost and Web Africa all showed strong growth during the same period.

MWEB previously said that their strategy behind the uncapped hosting offering is two-fold: to become a bigger player in the local hosting market and to make the most of their unused upstream ADSL bandwidth.

MWEB has some way to go to rival established hosting companies such as Hetzner, Web Africa, Internet Solutions and Afrihost as the graph below shows.

MWEB ISP CEO Derek Hershaw said that things are going exceptionally well since they launched their uncapped hosting products.

“We’re attracting a lot of new customers and obviously the free offer to our existing ADSL base has been very well received,” said Hershaw.

“Also bear in mind that it’s not a simple process to simply lift and move your website to another provider. A lot of small businesses need to get someone to do it for them, and they may also be tied in to contracts that need to run out before they can switch.”

“Regardless of that, the response has been great. The pricing is obviously a big factor but so is the simplicity of the offer – uncapped data and storage,” Hershaw pointed out.

“We do have aggressive growth numbers for the rest of the year. We’re not only expecting existing hosting customers to move from other providers but also to grow the market. An offer like this makes it easy and completely affordable to take your business online,” Hershaw concluded.

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