South Africa’s most trusted website hosting provider

MyBroadband’s business technology survey revealed that Afrihost is the most trusted hosting provider in South Africa, followed by Xneelo, Domains.co.za, and Axxess.

783 respondents completed the survey. Only responses from executives and managers who decide which ICT products their companies buy were considered.

As part of the survey, IT decision-makers were asked which hosting provider they trusted the most.

Afrihost dominated the rankings with 49% of the vote, which shows that South African businesses trust its brand more than its competitors.

Although Afrihost is mostly associated with broadband services like fibre and mobile data, it has its roots in the hosting market.

The company was founded in 1999 by three school friends Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong, and Peter Meintjes.

In the late nineties, hosting a website was prohibitively expensive. Companies like Mweb and Internet Solutions (now NTT Data) charged R550 monthly for a basic hosting package.

This inspired the three friends to offer much cheaper web hosting services. They launched a domain and web hosting package for only R150 per month.

Offering a competing service at a heavily discounted rate helped popularise web hosting in South Africa.

Throughout the early 2000s, Afrihost showed strong growth and became one of the biggest players in the retail hosting market.

It was only in 2009 that Afrihost entered South Africa’s hyper-competitive DSL service provider market with aggressively priced products.

The company is now known for its broadband offerings rather than hosting. However, it remains a big player in the hosting market.

Xneelo, formerly known as Hetzner, ranked second with 15% of the vote. Its performance remained stable during 2024.

Hetzner South Africa was founded in 1999 by Hans Wencke and is headquartered in Cape Town.

From its humble beginnings twenty-five years ago, it has grown into one of South Africa’s largest shared hosting providers with data centres in Gauteng and Cape Town.

In March 2016, the provider became the second South African host of the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX), and the first to receive a 10Gbps connection upgrade.

In 2019, Hetzner South Africa rebranded itself as Xneelo as part of its global expansion initiative to differentiate itself from Hetzner Online.

Earlier this year, Wencke returned to the company as CEO, replacing Philip Delport, who served as chief executive for two years.

“Hans, as the founder with 20+ years of experience, is best positioned to consider the future evolution and needs of the business,” said Delport.

Under his leadership, Hetzner grew to be one of the largest specialist web hosting providers in South Africa and the larger Middle East and Africa regions.

Domains.co.za, which was founded in 2012 by the internet service provider DiaMatrix, ranked third with 13% of the vote.

The main focus of Domains.co.za is to provide their customers with white-label multi-registrar solutions.

The chart below shows the hosting providers South African business decision-makers trust the most.