Hostafrica.co.za review

First impression

Hostafrica is a well-known and established web hosting service provider company that was founded in 2008 in South Africa by Michael Osterloh, a German citizen, who is the CEO of the company. This Cape Town-based company was originally named ‘Cloud to Machine’ and was renamed Hostafrica in 2017. They boast a solid customer base of over 20,000 customers, with servers based in South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the USA, and offer services such as Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Domain Registrations, and SSL certificates. 

Trial Period

Hostafrica doesn't offer a free trial period to test and try out their hosting services, but they do offer customers a 7-day free trial to test and try out their website builder. If, however, you do take out their Shared Hosting and you’re not 100% satisfied in your first 30 days, they'll give you your money back in full – no questions asked.

Billing Cycle

Their Shared & VPS Hosting offers clients the option of monthly, quarterly, semi-yearly, or annual payment periods, with discounts of up to 10% for longer payment periods.

Accepted means of payments are all leading Debit and Credit Cards, PayPal, Bank Transfers, and Flutterwave payments, which is an Africa-based fintech firm offering payment infrastructure to global merchants and African payment service providers.

Control Panel

With their Shared Hosting, you can enjoy access to cPanel, one of the most popular, web-based control panels that enable you to host your site even if you are not a tech wizard. With cPanel, you will also be able to browse through the different features of your website with ease, including setting up email accounts, handling files, setting up software, and even tracking your website's performance. With VPS servers, they do not come with control panels pre-installed, but cPanel & WHM can be added as an add-on at checkout time when purchasing your VPS server.

Limits

Hostafrica Shared Hosting is available in 4 scalable plans, all on enterprise-grade, super-fast SSD drives, which are the Web Hosting Starter, Web Hosting Basic, Web Hosting Power, and Web Hosting Business.

Their first plan is the Web Hosting Starter, which comes with 20GB SSD storage, a site limit of 2, 25x POP/IMAP email accounts, 5 subdomains, and 5x MySQL databases. The second plan is the Web Hosting Basic, which comes with 40GB SSD space, a site limit of 5, 100x POP/IMAP email accounts, 100x subdomains, and 50x MySQL databases. The Web Hosting Power comes with 100GB SSD disc space, a site limit of 10x websites hosted, 500 subdomains, and unlimited POP/IMAP email accounts and MySQL databases. And last but not the least, they have the Web Hosting Business, which comes with 200GB SSD storage space, a site limit of 20 Websites, 1000 subdomains, and unlimited POP/IMAP email accounts and MySQL databases. All Shared Hosting packages come with a free co.za domain, unlimited bandwidth, free daily backups, and a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.

Their VPS plans, however, provide various options from 1x vCore CPU, 1GB ECC RAM, and 200GB SSD disk space under the V1 Server plan, all the way up to 16x vCore CPUs, 64GB ECC RAM, and 500GB SSD disk space under the V9 Server plan. All the VPS plans come with a standard 1x IPv4 Static IP and unlimited traffic. 

Website Builder

They provide the SiteBuilder Website Builder in three plans with increasing disk space and email accounts. The builder provides a simple drag-and-drop feature with over 200 unique and fully responsive templates. The templates are simple to customize to easily install one's website or e-store and it even includes an AI text generator. Having personally used it previously, I am able to simply recommend it on the basis of ease of use. 

Security

Their servers are hosted in a Tier 3 ISO 27001-certified data center, which offers greater reliability and data security. They have DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack protection and Advanced Mail Spam protection integrated. They also have Anti-Malware protection with Uminify360, which secures your site against malware. They also have a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt and free daily backups, which offer security and simple recovery of your data.

For users who require more secure SSL certificates, you may opt for Positive SSL, Sectigo SSL, and Sectigo EV at an additional cost. 

OS

Hostafrica's Shared Hosting plans are based on the CloudLinux 7.9.0 operating system (OS), and their VPS plans offer customers a variety of options, such as Debian 9, 10, 11, or 12, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, or 22.04, and AlmaLinux 8 or 9. Their Windows VPS plans are based on Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, or Windows Server 2022 operating systems.

Support

Hostafrica offers some of the best support on the continent in terms of hosting. All of their representatives are polite and very professional and can be contacted at any time through Email or Support Tickets, or by Phone between 9 AM – 5 PM (South African time zone). Live Chat is a minute or two while through Email and Support Tickets they get back within 30 minutes.

Conclusion

Hostafrica offers low-cost plans that are hosted on top-of-the-line hardware and supported by great customer service. Uptime is great and unlimited traffic is included with all plans, so you will never have to worry about any additional charges. If you are looking for a new host then I would highly recommend checking them out.