Founded in 1993, longstanding company Internet Solutions (IS) is almost as old as the internet itself. Since its inception, it has expanded into multiple African countries and has made many acquisitions including Antfarm, ContinuitySA, MWEB Business, and Optinet Network services. Its fancy website is available in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Internet Solutions provides enterprise-level managed hosting, therefore you won’t find shared hosting here. Regardless of the particular package, its managed plans all come with the following core features:
- Guaranteed high performance and speed; backed by SLA
- Red Hat Linux OS and Microsoft support
- Microsoft and Linux LAMP application and operating system patching
- One system restore per year, from backup
- Operating system management and monthly patching
- Anti-virus management
Internet Solutions owns and operates 13 data centers in South Africa. This is great in itself since it should mean quicker response times to issues. Even better is the fact that the data centers are all Tier III, so you should experience less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. Although IS doesn’t advertise an uptime guarantee, it will provide an SLA based on the service you select.
This company offers a managed cloud package, which means it will handle all the technical hosting requirements such as configuration and maintenance of the servers. Also, all of your security and data backups will be handled by IS.
We monitor our services 24/7 to ensure we discover and address any issues with downtime or performance. We also conduct routine maintenance and backups to keep everything running smoothly. While this may not be necessary for small websites, it is crucial for large or high-traffic sites to have confidence that their data is being managed properly.
Pricing and Support
Internet Solutions’ prices are not displayed on its website, and you cannot buy hosting via the website. Although this may be a little annoying, it’s quite common for managed hosting services providers that will customize a plan specifically for your business. You pay monthly, and your payment amount will be adjusted (up or down) according to the resources you use.
There are two tiers of packages: Silver and Gold. The features are the same, but the Silver plans come with 12-hour support whereas the Gold plans provide 8-hour support plus a free annual disaster recovery and restore. Both packages include monthly reports giving an overview of performance, patching, and backups.
Online forms are provided for sales, general, and existing customer enquiries, and this company also allows you to visit its local branches in Cape Town, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, and Gauteng (all South Africa) plus Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana. The Internet Solutions website includes resources that are more like blogs than tutorials.
When I sent an exploratory email, I received a prompt reply advising me that I had been referred to another department. So far, so good, but after several days I had still not received a subsequent response.
