Wehostafrica.com review

First impression

WehostAfrica is a web hosting company that is based in Lagos, Nigeria. It was founded in 2013 with the aim of offering affordable and reliable hosting solutions across the African continent. They are made up of a small team of hosting professionals and currently offer services such as domain registrations, shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, as well as email and web security solutions.

Trial Period

After digging through their website, policies, and attempts to confirm it with their support team, it's clear that WehostAfrica doesn't offer any free trials or money-back guarantees whatsoever. What you pay is what you get, and there is no safety net to fall back on if things don't work out. That said, their pricing is competitive for the African market, and as you can choose monthly billing on shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers, you won't lose too much should they not live up to your expectations.

Billing Cycle

WehostAfrica's shared hosting users can choose between paying monthly, annually, or biennially for their subscriptions, making it a great fit for those who prefer short-term commitments or want to save with long-term discounts, although these discounts are not anything to write home about. Meanwhile, their VPS and dedicated server plans offer a bit more versatility with monthly, quarterly, and yearly payment cycles.

They currently accept payments via PayPal (international clients only), Flutterwave, Paystack, or bank transfers.

Control Panel

One thing that really stands out with WehostAfrica is that every single hosting plan comes bundled with cPanel - no exceptions. On VPS plans, you get the option to install it or to install your own, as you get full root access. For anyone who's ever wrestled with clunky hosting dashboards, this is a game-changer. cPanel is the industry go-to panel, it comes with a user-friendly interface that makes managing your website, whether it is setting up email accounts, installing WordPress, or just checking your bandwidth usage, a breeze.

Limits

Their shared hosting plans offer customers affordable, no-frills solutions suited for both individuals and small businesses looking to establish an online presence in Africa. These plans come in five scalable options that range from 3GB disc space, 25 POP/IMAP email accounts, 15GB bandwidth, and 10 subdomains on the 'Starter', their entry-level plan, up to 80GB storage space, with unlimited POP/IMAP email accounts, bandwidth and subdomains on the 'Premium' plan which is on the other end of the spectrum. All plans come standard with a free SSL certificate and a .com.ng or .org.ng domain, but one needs to note that the hard drives they use are still standard HDDs and not fast SSD drives.

Unlike their shared hosting plans, where you get a lot of options, their VPS plans only offer 2 choices. The 'Starter', which features 2 Core CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 40GB SSD disc space, or the 'Best' plan, which has 4 Core CPUs, 10GB RAM, and 120GB SSD storage space, in my opinion, are still just suited for medium-sized projects or high traffic ecommerce sites.

Website Builder

Their shared hosting plans come with Softaculous that lets you install CMS's with just one click. They also offer dedicated WordPress hosting, a type of shared hosting specifically optimized for WordPress. WordPress (and most content management systems for that matter) comes with all the tools necessary to quickly create a professional-looking website, even ecommerce sites, without any coding knowledge. It is also a lot less restrictive than most dedicated builders.

What I found interesting is that although they don't advertise a website builder (besides WordPress) on their website, their client portal comes with an option to purchase the Weebly website builder (there is also a free plan available). This builder features a straightforward drag-and-drop interface, which makes building pages as simple as moving elements around a canvas - perfect for small business owners, freelancers, or anyone needing a quick online presence. Weebly is probably suited more for novices, while advanced developments will require WordPress.

Security

WeHostAfrica covers the basics when it comes to security, primarily because they use Cloudflare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network). By routing their hosting through Cloudflare, they automatically benefit from DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack protection, as well as a WAF (web application firewall), a security layer that protects web applications by monitoring, filtering, and blocking malicious HTTP/HTTPS traffic before it reaches the server or web application. Furthermore, all accounts come with a free SSL certificate by Let's Encrypt and "Whois Guard" for domain privacy. Unfortunately, there is no virus or spam protection included. Average security protection at best.

OS

Wehostafrica employs the CentOS operating system as the backbone for its shared hosting infrastructure. This OS is a free, open-source Linux distribution and a popular choice for servers, web hosting, and enterprise environments, while their VPS plans offer users the option to choose between CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian. Not the biggest selection I have seen, and sadly, no Windows options either.

Support

If you're the type of user who likes to get instant help when you run into issues, then WehostAfrica is probably not for you. They claim their agents are available 24/7 via phone, email, support tickets, live chat, and even WhatsApp. Sadly, none of these channels worked for me. My emails went unanswered, live chat doesn't seem to be working, and the WhatsApp number is invalid. My tickets, however, did get a vague reply after two days. Certainly not support to be proud of.

Conclusion

In my opinion, WeHostAfrica comes across as a hosting provider that started with ambitions of becoming a major player in Africa but eventually turned into a side project. Their shared hosting plans still rely on standard HDDs, their security is basic, and their support is practically nonexistent. If you're looking for a new provider, my advice would be to steer clear of this one as there are far better options available!