Top hosting providers in SA: Does uncapped work?

In March this year MWEB surprised the local hosting market when they unveiled their Uncapped Hosting offering at R19 a month.

MWEB’s hosting service significantly undercut any competing products in the South African market, and it was not too long before other hosting providers reacted with lower bandwidth fees and uncapped hosting products of their own.

In recent weeks Web Africa and RSAWeb launched uncapped hosting products, ranging between R19 per month and R439 in price.

Two of the largest hosting providers in South Africa, Hetzner and Afrihost, have upped their bandwidth limits and reduced their bandwidth over usage costs, but have so far not launched uncapped products.

This raises the question whether uncapped hosting has the same appeal as uncapped broadband.  The answer, according to the latest Webhosting.info statistics, is no.

Top web hosts and growth

According to Webhosting.info Hetzner dominates the local consumer web hosting market, followed by Web Africa, Internet Solutions, Afrihost (DNS1) and MWEB.

South African Web Hosting Companies

Looking at the domain growth over the last five weeks, Hetzner and Afrihost showed the strongest growth.

Hetzner Total Domains Trend

Afrihost Total Domains Trend

MWEB and WebAfrica’s domain numbers actually declined despite having launched aggressively priced uncapped hosting products.

MWEB Total Domains Trend

Web Africa Total Domains Trend

RSAWEB showed steady growth, but as they only recently launched their uncapped offerings, the data is not relevant regarding the attractiveness of an uncapped hosting product.

RSAWEB Total Domains Trend

Whilst these statistics are by no means comprehensive, only providing a rough snap shot of activity in the South African hosting environment, they do show that uncapped hosting products have not created the same buzz as uncapped accounts in the ADSL market.