Imaginet has been providing South African hosting and internet services since 1997. Now, it has customers nationwide and a presence in all South African towns and cities. The website and support are both provided in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Imaginet offers a wide range of services from home internet to website hosting. The shared hosting plans come with the following standard features:
- 99.9% uptime – not backed by an SLA
- Manual backups can be configured
- Domain registration available
- Unlimited subdomains
- SSL support available
- 200MB to 8000MB disk space
- Unlimited monthly traffic
Imaginet has a “Site Creator Hosting” plan, which includes an in-house website building tool for free. The tool comes with more than 200 mobile responsive templates, with e-commerce integrations. The nice thing is that you’re able to demo the tool without signing up, directly from Imaginet’s website.
The website building tool supports various SEO features e.g., Embed Google Analytics, metadata, downloadable sitemaps, meta tags, and keyword setup. Additionally, there’s optional SEO assistance, whereby you can purchase an SEO Audit, SEO implementation, or SEO monthly management, for an extra fee.
For advanced users, there is support for PHP 5.3.2, CGI, and Perl 2.0, which are, unfortunately, all old versions of the software. Then there’s the usual features such as MySQL databases, FTP access, and DNS control included, but nothing too groundbreaking.
The website doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee or SLA, but it does mention that they anticipate an uptime of over 99%, which is lower than the industry standard of 99.9%.
Pricing and Support
The prices are quite high, considering the level of resources and features included, plus there’s a setup fee incurred on some of the plans. Once you’ve purchased your hosting, you do still need to purchase a domain name and a SSL certificate, so the prices certainly add up.
As you can only purchase the plans in one month terms, you can’t take advantage of any discounts for purchasing a longer term (unlike with other companies). There isn’t a money-back guarantee or a free trial, but on the positive side, there’s no contract and you can cancel at any time.
Imaginet does surprisingly well at customer service. There’s a large FAQ section on the website and a “Tech Talk” section, which is basically a knowledge base. If you’d prefer to chat with customer service, it is open Monday to Friday 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. on weekends and holidays.
There’s a mixed bag of reviews online about its customer service and in my experience, I sent an email at 4:00 p.m. on a weekday and received a response on the same business day. The operator was helpful and friendly, answering my question in full.
