BlueSteam is a privately owned South African web hosting company that started offering reasonably priced web services in 2005, solely to South African citizens. Although this host started out as a simple web hosting company, it has since expanded its services to include domain registration and transfer, SSL certificates, spam protection, a website builder, remote PC support, and website design/development. BlueSteam’s website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
BlueSteam offers four shared hosting plans with servers sitting either within South Africa or in the European Union. These hosting plans provide you with:
- A free co.za domain for the first year (when buying the higher plans annually)
- 1 GB to 15 GB SSD storage
- 1 to 50 hosted domains (listed as addon domains)
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited email accounts
- Email forwarding and autoresponders
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Unlimited parked domains and subdomains
- Free spam protection
- Free weekly backups
- Webmail access
If you want to create a CMS-backed or e-commerce website, the Softaculous installer makes it easy for you to install almost 350 applications, including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, osCommerce, OpenCart, and PrestaShop.
BlueSteam offers four Weebly website builder plans to make the website creation process easier. Using the drag-and-drop interface, you can create a professional web presence without requiring the expertise of a professional web designer or developer.
If you’re still not confident about setting up your website, you can call on BlueSteam’s website design services (with optional logo design at additional cost). You get a free domain and free hosting for a year.
Once your website is up-and-running, the usage statistics will tell you how well it’s performing. The 99.9% uptime guarantee will credit you with a month’s free hosting providing you claim within seven days of failure to meet this commitment.
Pricing and Support
BlueSteam’s shared hosting plans are competitively-priced, although the higher plans are priced higher than the industry average. You can pay for these plans in U.S. dollars or South African rands via various (mainly South African) payment methods on monthly or annual billing cycles. The 30-day money-back guarantee gives you a month to get out if anything goes wrong.
Contact BlueSteam’s customer support team via telephone, ticket, pre-sales contact form, or WhatsApp (during working hours on weekdays). I got answers to my pre-sales questions within an hour via email:
Self-support resources include an informative blog, an extensive knowledge base, a set of YouTube tutorials, and cPanel user documentation.
