When you want to host a high traffic, resource hungry website or web application, just a simple web hosting service usually won’t be enough for you. In this case, you would need to consider VPS, cloud or dedicated hosting. In this post, we will look into the most popular and affordable option from the three – VPS (virtual private server) hosting. It’s a virtual server with dedicated resources, operating system and full control. It can be used for various purposes and some of them include hosting a web server or an online application. It is a lot more powerful alternative to web hosting, where all of the server resources are shared amongst the users.
When deciding on a VPS hosting company there are some things to consider. One of the most important decision is where should be the server located. Why? It is necessary because a big part of your server’s performance and network speed depends on the server and end user location. For example, if you know that most of the visitors / users that will use your website or application live in one region, it would be better if you choose a server location that is as close to them as possible.
Africa is a rapidly growing and perspective region for a lot of new and developed businesses. Having an online presence there becomes more and more important. If we talk about hosting, there are not so many options to choose from, especially for VPS hosting services. South Africa is the country which has the most developed IT infrastructure in this region, so our article is aimed to help you choose the best hosting company for you needs that offers VPS hosting in this country. So let’s review some of the offers of these hosting companies.
ClickWorks.net.za
This is a hosting company based in South Africa. They have datacenters in Johannesburg, Cape Town and offer 5 different VPS hosting plans.
However, if we only review the most affordable offer – 512 MB plan, its cost reaches R79 which would be about $6.5 USD per month. For this price, you would get 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk space and 200 GB bandwidth. They also offer 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB plans with a price range from about $8 to $80 USD per month.
Host1Plus.com
Host1Plus hosting company is based in London, UK. They have various VPS hosting locations, including South Africa (Johannesburg). Host1Plus offers 4 different VPS South Africa plans.
Their cheapest VPS hosting plan in there would cost you $3 USD per month. For such a price you would get 0.5 CPU cores, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB disk space and 500 GB bandwidth. Their second, Silver plan, costs almost the same as the lowest ClickWorks plan, but offers a bit more resources – 1 CPU core, 768 MB RAM, 30 GB disk space, and 1000 GB bandwidth. Their more powerful, Gold and Platinum plans, cost quite a bit more – $19 and $45 per month. It is worth to mention that all of their VPS plans are fully customizable – you can add or lower each of these resources to make your own custom plan. We have also been able to find their South African VPS hosting silver plan’s server performance results (CPU, HDD, network speed), which is available online here.
WebAfrica.co.za
WebAfrica.co.za offers a large variety of VPS hosting plans – you can choose from 6 of options, so there is a lot of chance that you can find the one suitable for you. However, the prices here are the most expensive – their cheapest plan costs R99 which is about $8 USD monthly. The plans resources are 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk space and 10 GB bandwidth. As you can see, their bandwidth limit is quite low, and they ask for about $0.40 for each GB of traffic above the limit. So if you plan to use a lot of network bandwidth, their VPS hosting might not be suitable for you. Other plans range from $24 to $80 USD per month.
In conclusion, we could say that there are two things to consider while you are looking for a hosting company – think about the pricing of the company and the resources you can actually get for that price. Companies experience and reputation in the hosting business is also important. We hope that now, you will have a clearer view of available VPS hosting options in Africa’s most IT developed country – South Africa.
