In this blog post, you will learn more about Afrihost hosting.
Afrihost is one of the most popular hosting providers in South Africa. They have been around for over 10 years and they offer reliable hosting services to their customers.
In this blog post, you will learn about Afrihost’s pricing plans and service availability, as well as some other important information that you need to know before making your decision!
Afrihost is among the leading ISP tech companies here in South Africa.
But besides their broadband services, Afrihost is also well recognized for its hosting services.
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Types of Afrihost hosting services
a). Linux Web Hosting
A Web Hosting Account allows you to host your website and store it on their servers.
You have the option of choosing how much storage space (typically gigabytes) and bandwidth (typical megabytes per month) that you want for your site.
As well as what kind of features are included with the plan such as domain registration or email accounts.
Now, hosting accounts comes in different forms, mostly depending on the type of operating system used to run the account.
Linux and Windows hosting.
Linux as you can guess is the one using Linux OS, while Windows is the one running on Windows OS.
Linux OS is open source, which explains why it is so popular here in South Africa.
Features of Afrihost Linux hosting
This Afrihost hosting plan is shared, which means you will be sharing server resources with other users.
While this may have some impact on performance, it is the most affordable hosting package in South Africa.
In fact, dedicated hosting costs 13X the cost of shared hosting in South Africa.
Here are some of the common features you will find with Afrihost hosting Linux plans;
- A free .co.za or .site or .online for first-year – remember, this is only applicable if you are going with either .co.za domain, .site, or .online domain.
- Unlimited web traffic
- Website control panel
- Latest PHP Version
- Mellanox Switches
Afrihost hosting costs
What is the cost of hosting a website on Afrihost?
The cheapest shared Afrihost hosting package is going for R39 per month.
Comes with a free domain (either .co.za or .site or .online) and a storage space of up to 1GB.
Supports up to 50 email accounts and gives you access to a website builder.
If this sounds like not enough features for you to grow a thriving website, there are other 6 Afrihost packages to choose from.
For example;
You can upgrade to the Gold Pro plan for R175 per month and get 20GB of storage, free set up, 5K email addresses, and 200 MySQL databases.
b). Windows Web Hosting
This is another type of website hosting here in South Africa
But instead of running the same ol’ Linux OS, this hosting account is powered by Windows.
Windows hosting is a proprietary OS used to create websites.
And Afrihost is offering shared windows web hosting starting from R59 per month.
With a Windows hosting account, you can host ASP and PHP websites.
c). Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting in South Africa comes from cloud computing.
Cloud computing, also known as “cloud” or sometimes “web-scale” computing, describes a range of Internet-based services such as online storage (aka “the cloud”), software, and platform virtualization which are delivered over the Internet.
Cloud can be an extremely cost-effective way to store your data offsite with unlimited space that you would not need to purchase!
All you have to do is upload all of your files onto their servers for safekeeping.
As a web hosting plan, the cloud is the best place to have your website because it offers better security and performance because it brings pools together server resources.
Cloud hosting services are servers that use remote internet-connected datacenters to host websites, data, and applications for organizations or individuals.
Essentially, this means you can leverage outsourced infrastructure to be able to offer your business the same level of service without having all the hardware in-house – so it’s scalable!
In terms of security, there are multiple levels of protection built into the system that ensures against any type of breach from occurring.
This includes both physical and electronic safeguards as well as automated systems to prevent cyberattacks on networked devices or their operating systems.
For example: if someone were trying to access your website with an infected device, the system would be able to detect their activity and block them from entering.
At Afrihost, you can get cloud hosting in South Africa from as low as R310 per month.
Features include;
- Web Traffic – 4 TB
- HDD Size – 100 GB
- Storage Type – SAN
- CPU – 1 vCPUs
- RAM – 2 GB
- Data transfer overage – 29c per GB
There are other three packages that give you more features, but costs more per month.
Other Afrihost cloud hosting plans include;
- Enterprise Cloud Hosting – this is a perfect cloud hosting solution for entrepreneurs and businesses in South Africa. The costs start from R910 per month and give you access to enough features for upgraded performance.
- Managed Cloud Hosting – if you’d wish Afrihost hosting team to handle everything for you, this is the plan to go with. You will pay as low as R810 per month for less stress.
- Managed Enterprise Hosting – with this package, you are letting their dedicated team handle all the heavy lifting for you.
Why Afrihost cloud hosting?
Among the many benefits of using Afrihost hosting services, the best one is the fact that most of their servers are hosted locally.
This means that you users will be experiencing fast connections to your website, which improves user experience.
d). Specialized Hosting
Besides what we have already discussed, there are other types of Afrihost hosting services;
Reseller Hosting allows you to start a web hosting company in South Africa, by reselling Afrihost’s services at a profit.
To get started, all you have to do is acquire their reseller packages starting from R510 per month.
With this plan, you have unlimited web traffic, 50GB of storage space, and the ability to host unlimited domains among other perks.
The other Afrihost hosting service is Dedicated Server. Here, instead of sharing server resources with other users, you can have the entire server to yourself.
While this is the best way to grow an online business here in South Africa, it costs more than shared hosting, with prices starting from R970 per month.
As such, it is only recommended for big organizations and websites with a ton of traffic as well as those who’d wish to run custom applications.
A good example is gaming servers in South Africa.
Then there is managed dedicated hosting.
As its name suggests, you will only be responsible for the cost, while the Afrihost hosting team will help handle the configurations and maintenance of the server.
How do I host a website on Afrihost?
To host a website on Afrihost, you need two things; a hosting account and a domain name. To get a domain, you can either register a brand new one with them or transfer an existing one. And then order a hosting account.
This will depend on your needs.
For example;
If you are working with a shoe-string budget, go with Afrihost shared hosting because it is affordable.