C-NEST seems to be the cloud hosting brand of Botswana-based Nashua NEST, a company which was founded in 2015 with a vision to provide pan-African hosting services as Botswana’s first cloud hosting provider. C-NEST’s website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
C-NEST offers a range of services, including disaster recovery, cloud servers, managed hosting, and regular shared hosting. It’s shared plans come with these core features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Cloud backups and disaster recovery plans
- Free .com domain with two-year plans
- Up to unlimited add-on domains
- Free SSL certificates
- Up to 30 GB web space
- Up to 100,000 visitors per month
One of C-NEST’s notable features is its own data center in Botswana. I do like it when a host owns its own data center because it should mean faster responses to issues and less chance of resources being oversold.
The hosting plans come with everything I’ve come to expect. Firstly, the cPanel/Softaculous combo for managing your hosting and installing additional apps; no coding required. Secondly, PHP and a MySQL or MS SQL database for coders to create dynamic content. Oh, and FTP for uploading web files.
C-NEST’s website also insists that it can “meet any other typically non-standard requirements such as SSH hosting/access,” but you should be sure to confirm with customer services before making any assumptions about what is on offer.
Pricing and Support
C-NEST’s prices are higher than I expected, but — to be honest — I don’t know what the going rate should be for a Botswana-based host with its own data center. You get a free .com domain when you sign up for a two-year term, and free website migration or free CMS setup if you move over from another host.
Unfortunately, you can’t purchase plans online, so you have to contact the company by email to initiate the process. You can also call the company for support, or resort to its self-support resources that include a blog (last updated over a year ago), a set of useful documents (which are not that useful), a “Basics of Cloud Computing” tutorial, and a small selection of frequently asked questions.
