The man who became the face of ISP excellence in South Africa

Afrihost CEO Gian Visser would be the first to say their success has been a team effort. However, he is undoubtedly the face of South Africa’s top Internet service provider (ISP).

Whenever you speak to him, he is full of praise for his Afrihost team, and the company’s LinkedIn page is almost entirely dedicated to celebrating its employees.

“It’s really easy to do a good job when you’ve got such a great team,” Visser said in a 2020 interview on MyBroadband What’s Next with Aki Anastasiou.

“That’s not just words. My team is absolutely amazing. They make my job a lot easier than it could be.”

As the face of the Afrihost team, Visser puts himself in the public firing line, whether in good times or bad. He owns the company’s mistakes while being humble in success.

There has been a lot of success in recent years. Afrihost has dominated South African ISP ratings, winning the MyBroadband ISP of the Year award two years in a row, and looks set to win the 2025 award.

However, Afrihost’s journey hasn’t been sunshine and roses. While it’s on top of the world now, it has also experienced challenging times.

These challenges saw it go from hero to zero, and it needed to rebuild its reputation as a consumer champion with high customer service standards.

Afrihost earned this reputation in its early days.

Founded in 1999 by three school friends — Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong, and Peter Meintjes — Afrihost made a name for itself in South Africa’s web hosting space before entering the broadband market.

In the late nineties, hosting a website was prohibitively expensive. Companies like Mweb and Internet Solutions (now NTT Data) charged R550 per month 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 — a strategy they would use to great effect many years later to enter the broadband market.

Visser previously told MyBroadband that Afrihost was his first real job, as they started the company right after he finished university.

Before that, he had dropped off pamphlets and looked after people’s pets while they were away on holiday.

“I walked around my neighbourhood dropping pamphlets in post boxes, and I was paid R40 a day to visit the client’s house, feed their pets, and check that everything was fine,” said Visser.

“My first real job was with Afrihost. My salary was zero for the first 8 months — I was still staying at home eating my Mom’s food,” he said.

“My first salary was R5,500 per month for the next 10 months, until I received a raise to R6,500.”

Afrihost soon became one of the biggest players in the retail hosting market.

Internet Solutions executive Greg Payne saw the company’s potential and resigned from his corporate job to join Afrihost as a director in 2008.

In 2009, Afrihost embarked on a strategy to expand beyond web hosting and entered South Africa’s hyper-competitive DSL service provider market.

Its first product offered DSL data at R55 per gigabyte — between R5 and R15 cheaper than other players in the space.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to attract many signups. Afrihost realised it had to be even more aggressive to gain real traction.

At an informal strategy meeting, the team decided to use their advertising budget to subsidise their DSL product and re-enter the market at R29 per GB.

For six months, Afrihost was every South African broadband consumer’s hero.

They signed up thousands of customers within weeks and quickly became one of the largest ADSL service providers in South Africa.

However, another massive disruption shook the market in March 2010 when Mweb launched uncapped DSL. All of a sudden, Mweb became every consumer’s hero and every rival ISP’s worst nightmare.

Visser and his team are not the type to give up a good fight. They quickly found a way to offer their own uncapped packages.

They more than held their own in a fiercely competitive market — they thrived.

The next four years were a period of immense success and growth for Afrihost. From 2011 to 2014, it won the coveted MyBroadband ISP of the Year Award four years in a row.

Afrihost also acquired a controlling stake in Axxess, further extending its reach in the ISP market. The deal saw former Internet Solutions CEO Angus MacRobert become an Afrihost shareholder and director.

Their success also caught the attention of big telecommunication players, among them MTN.

At the time, MTN did not have a strong presence in the residential and small business ISP market, and Afrihost could fill this gap. Afrihost was also a wholesale customer of MTN’s, so a deal made perfect sense for both parties.

In 2014, MTN bought 50% plus one share of the company for R408 million. Unfortunately, what should have been a big win turned out to be the beginning of a tumultuous two years for the ISP.

After two years of slow product development and declining service levels, Afrihost’s directors bought back MTN’s stake in the company.

The transaction brought in new shareholders and saw founder Peter Meintjes leave the company to start a new life in the United States.

One of Afrihost’s new shareholders was former Internet Solutions executive Dean Suchard, who was appointed financial director.

At the MyBroadband Conference in 2016, Visser said the main reason they bought the shareholding back from MTN was because they were dreamers and risk-taking entrepreneurs at heart.

“We like pushing the edges and leaping off cliffs and, you know, in all honesty, that doesn’t necessarily go well with big structured corporates,” he said.

Visser said the biggest issue they encountered was the speed of decision-making. They wanted to be able to develop a product or promotion and launch it within hours — something that wasn’t possible in a big company.

“There’s a saying we use in Afrihost — if you’re going to be a cowboy, you’ve got to know how to ride,” said Visser.

“We are cowboys, there’s no question about it, and we are planning to do a lot of riding over the next few years.”

However, another crucial issue was that Afrihost’s service levels had declined in 2015 and 2016, and performance on its broadband products suffered.

In brief, it had not provisioned enough capacity on its network to serve its customers’ needs, which caused it to plummet from first place in the ISP rankings to outside the top 10.

As the face of Afrihost, Visser took the flak on social networks and community platforms like the MyBroadband forum, which he took in stride.

Although they faced a lot of criticism, there was newfound energy at Afrihost after the directors bought the company back.

It took years of dedicated work, but Afrihost climbed from eleventh in the South African ISP rankings in 2017 to second in October 2020.

Visser said that although they were happy with their improvement, they would not rest until they were number one again.

Their ambition and hard work paid off. As of 2023, Afrihost is back on top.

Visser said at the 2016 MyBroadband Conference that to succeed as an Internet service provider in South Africa, you must either be a price leader or a service and customer experience leader.

“If you’re going to be a price leader, that becomes all about volume. If you can’t compete on volume, you’ll need to compete on being a service quality leader or a customer experience leader,” he said. “We try to do both.”

Afrihost has become the company to aspire to and beat in South Africa’s ISP space.

As much as Visser is the face of the Afrihost team, Afrihost has become the face of ISP excellence in South Africa.