Web Africa, currently South Africa’s 2^nd biggest hosting provider, has just launched their new range of hosting products – Nitro Unlimited.

Web Africa has just released their new Nitro Unlimited hosting range that promises to be a highly competitive product in the local hosting space by giving clients access to unlimited bandwidth and a fully equipped control panel that makes managing your website and email accounts a breeze.

The new Nitro Unlimited hosting range gives clients the choice of a Linux or Windows hosting environment with the option of hosting locally in South Africa or internationally at no additional charge.

Head of Product and Marketing, Cliff Hazell had this to say about their new offering: “We’re bringing leading international standards home, and giving South Africans the exceptional value and experience they deserve.”

Web Africa’s Nitro Unlimited hosting range starts from as low as R19pm and have a 30 day money back guarantee should you not be satisfied with the product.

Nitro Unlimited Hosting Packages Breakdown

MWEB the company that stunned the local ADSL market exactly a year ago by offering South Africans cheap uncapped ADSL is at it again and this time they are taking on expensive hosting prices.

Hosting your site locally could set you back quite a few bucks, and thus many people running sites has opted to rather host internationally than locally, but MWEB is again changing the landscape of the local Internet space.

MWEB has just announced their new uncapped local hosting offering, bringing local hosting prices in line with that of international ones. The new MWEB Uncapped Hosting will allow users to host their sites locally without any bandwidth or storage restrictions from as little as R19 per month.

The new local uncapped hosting offering is aimed at small businesses and individuals and includes a free “co.za” domain which will automatically renew every year, plus a free email address with up to 5 aliases and will operate on a shared hosting environment.

It has to be noted that although the service is uncapped there is a acceptable usage policy in place to prevent users from setting up media farms where they can download movies and share it amongst others.

Good news for MWEB ADSL subscribers is that they may make use of the Uncapped Hosting package free of charge for the first 12 months, after which the R19/month fee may apply, this excludes 1GB customers.

I for one am happy to see this change in the local hosting space as it was long overdue, now its just a matter of time before other hosting providers like WebAfrica, Afrihost and RSAWEB respond to this and we will see the whole ADSL price war all over again but this time for hosting.

Cloud hosting seems to be the craze lately with just about all new Internet Startups starting their business with these virtual hosting servers, but in South Africa cloud hosting is a relatively new term with only a hand full of hosting companies offering it.

What are cloud servers you ask? Well to put it simple its exactly like a physical dedicated server, but where it differs is that it gets its resources like CPU power, RAM and HDD space form a pool of available hardware.

Why get yourself a cloud server? Cause you get all the privileges you would as when you get a dedicated server like choosing your operating system and deciding what software to install and the server’s configuration, but instead of paying large amounts of money for a physical machine with more resources you would need you can customise your cloud server with a minimum amount of resource and then as your site or service grows additional resources can be added on the fly without any downtime.

Another great thing about cloud hosting is the setup and server migration times, because there is no need for a technician to physically go out to the data center to set up your cloud server it means you could have your cloud hosting server up and running in a matter of minutes.

In South Africa cloud hosting is relatively new with RSAWEB being the only hosting company in South Africa to offer local cloud hosting up until now, but competition is heating up and two new players are now also offering cloud hosting servers with another few set to launch theirs during the next few months.

At the moment the only companies offering cloud hosting servers in South Africa are RSAWEB, Afrihost and Gamco, I have compared the different packages and this is how they stack up against each other:

As you can see even if you are just running a small website but would like to have more control over your server, Cloud Hosting will make it happen while not costing you an arm and a leg.