South Africa's hosting providers compared

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Jamie McKane

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South Africa's hosting providers compared

Whether you're planning on starting up a website or are looking to move to a new host, there are many South African hosting providers to choose from.

It is crucial that you pick the right hosting service if you want to ensure that you get reliable performance and sufficient hosting resources for your website.
 
The real method when choosing a hosting provider:

Step 1: visit both domains.co.za and hetzner.co.za
Step 2: pick one that has a package that best suits your requirements

Done. Enjoy having an awesome host with awesome performance and customer support.
 
Bryn said:
The real method when choosing a hosting provider:

Step 1: visit both domains.co.za and hetzner.co.za
Step 2: pick one that has a package that best suits your requirements

Done. Enjoy having an awesome host with awesome performance and customer support.
Click to expand...
Speaking from experience?
 
Bryn said:
Personal experience and the collective experience of the devs on this forum. Domains and Hetzner are by miles the best hosts in SA.
Click to expand...

Thanks, interesting to know. There's always been high praise for Hetzner, but I haven't even heard of Domains, nor seen any advertising of theirs.
 
Axxess
Afrihost
Vox
RSAWeb
Above are all ISP. Don't take them for hosting.

Your actual options are:
datakeepers.co.za/virtualservers.co.za
hetzner.co.za
domains.co.za

And then the giants that are incoming:
AWS

And already here:
Azure

Personally nearly finished migrating from Hetzner to virtualservers, just a lot cheaper while also being in Cape Town, so lower latency for most of our customer base. Hetzner is very good though, have had about a combined one day of downtime I think over all the different products over the last two years.

EDIT:
A cool test would be performance btw, @rpm, just run an ApacheBench nice article on it here: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215945987-Web-server-performance-comparison
 
Johnatan56 said:
Axxess
Afrihost
Vox
RSAWeb
Above are all ISP. Don't take them for hosting.

Your actual options are:
datakeepers.co.za/virtualservers.co.za
hetzner.co.za
domains.co.za

And then the giants that are incoming:
AWS

And already here:
Azure

Personally nearly finished migrating from Hetzner to virtualservers, just a lot cheaper while also being in Cape Town, so lower latency for most of our customer base. Hetzner is very good though, have had about a combined one day of downtime I think over all the different products over the last two years.

EDIT:
A cool test would be performance btw, @rpm, just run an ApacheBench nice article on it here: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215945987-Web-server-performance-comparison
Click to expand...
How is virtualservers support lets say at 3am on a Saturday morning? If you have dedicated services with them, do they have a 24/7 support line and can change a HDD within an hour?

Unless they are a lot cheaper I do not see why I should move from hetzer. Pretty happy with for the last couple of years. I am waiting for AWS though, once launched locally im moving all servers.
 
ToxicBunny said:
Why not just man up and use azure?
Click to expand...
I know next to nothing about Windows servers (I'm a Linux guy), but recently had to put together pricing for a Windows server solution based on specs from the vendor. Hosting a Windows VM in Azure turned out to be about 2x-3x more expensive than have a dedicated Self-Managed server with a Windows license from Hetzner. Even in AWS the equivalent EC2 with Windows was 3x more expensive. I can't figure out why renting dedicated hardware for a Windows Server is cheaper than a Virtual Machine.
 
I don't see a single host listed there except for hetzner.

Domains.co.za is second to none. Faster than Digital Ocean and Vultr.

The mybb article lists resellers and ISPs those are not hosts.
 
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It really all depends what you require . But the best value / flexibility in my opinion is is the Hetzner TruServ range with backups to AWS S3

Data keepers were a bit flaky when I tried them last year, so can’t recommend them for production . But they are cheap if you want a windows vm
 
SilverCode said:
I know next to nothing about Windows servers (I'm a Linux guy), but recently had to put together pricing for a Windows server solution based on specs from the vendor. Hosting a Windows VM in Azure turned out to be about 2x-3x more expensive than have a dedicated Self-Managed server with a Windows license from Hetzner. Even in AWS the equivalent EC2 with Windows was 3x more expensive. I can't figure out why renting dedicated hardware for a Windows Server is cheaper than a Virtual Machine.
Click to expand...
The cloud is not about dedicated hardware.. It's about building the smallest baseline possible and expanding and contracting as needed... At least on the server side.
 
Happy Days said:
Speaking from experience?
Click to expand...
I completely agree with #Bryn

Have dealt with Hetzner for years and they are brilliant.

Had a bunch of clients with Afrihost years ago which was a complete disaster.

Moved them to domains.co.za and have not had a single complaint since.

As Bryn said - test with both and see which has the best package for your needs; can't go wrong with either.

NB. You get what you pay for!
 
Last edited:
I use Azure for IaaS and other services. For good old baremetal, SoYouStart (SYS) which is a mid range OVH product. Or Kimsufi which is an entry level product - dedicated servers from $4 . SYS $50 for 8core xeon, 32GB ram and 3x120GB SSD + DDoS and static ips. ZA hosting is a ripoff.
 
jeevadotnet said:
I use Azure for IaaS and other services. For good old baremetal, SoYouStart (SYS) which is a mid range OVH product. Or Kimsufi which is an entry level product - dedicated servers from $4 . SYS $50 for 8core xeon, 32GB ram and 3x120GB SSD + DDoS and static ips. ZA hosting is a ripoff.
Click to expand...

I don't see why SA hosting is a rip-off. Standard hosting on Hetzner is R150pm, the equivalent of $10. And you get 10GB SSD storage, unlimited traffic, local 24/7 support, free auto SSL for all domains, free daily backups etc. from a company well known for exceptional uptime, customer service and general performance.
 
This article really only compares packages.
I used to be a happy Afrihost customer but experienced far too many unacknowledged and seemingly random outages.
I'm much happier with Hetzner in spite of the higher fees. The outages are now for scheduled maintenance, and although I'd like to be forewarned, at least the downtime is less frequent and can be explained.
No experience with the others.
 
3lOH55A said:
How is virtualservers support lets say at 3am on a Saturday morning? If you have dedicated services with them, do they have a 24/7 support line and can change a HDD within an hour?

Unless they are a lot cheaper I do not see why I should move from hetzer. Pretty happy with for the last couple of years. I am waiting for AWS though, once launched locally im moving all servers.
Click to expand...
Haven't had a problem yet, they do state 24/7 support but I haven't stayed up at 3am on a Saturday to check. Except for one client, all of them wouldn't have a problem with a 3-4 hour window of downtime in the middle of the night as their clients don't access their services at that time.

Plus backup plans, we could literally deploy another instance of any project within a couple of minutes as everything is running in docker with multiple backups. At most we'd lose about 30 minutes of changes on most sites, while the ones where it matters have a redundant DB set up on another provider where all transactions are cloned. Can't really go past that within budget and no point. Not large enterprise stuff.

Price difference, well hetzner self managed starts at 995, which is a bit steep since the Lin4 package at R499 from datakeepers (4 vCPU, 6GB RAM, 200GB SSD storage and unmetered traffic) meets our needs better. There is also a noticeable performance difference since hdd vs SSD.

One of the main reasons though again is latency, most clients are CT and their clients are in CT, if I can reduce average latency by 20ms (besides the 0.2s moving to SSD brought) for every request and save money, why wouldn't I?

Haven't come close to 2TB of data either, so that wasn't a concern.
 
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