To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.
Founded in 2003 under a different name, then rebranded to Register Domain SA in 2005, this website hosting provider is based in Cape Town, South Africa. They have customers in South Africa, the rest of Africa, and the rest of the world. Their website and support are provided in English.
Features and Ease of Use
Register Domain SA provides a suite of website hosting services designed for small and medium-sized businesses. As standard, their shared hosting plans come with the following features:
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Weekly backups, retained for one week
- Domain registration available
- From 1 to 25 add-on domains
- SSL certificates available
- From 500MB to 25GB disk space
- Unlimited traffic
The first thing that impressed me about Register Domain SA is their 99.99% uptime service level agreement that is clearly explained in their comprehensive terms and conditions. They owe this high uptime to their infrastructure and servers across three data centers with 100% Juniper network and a 10Gbps fiber ring provided by local providers AfricaINX and Internet Solutions. They also have N+2 redundancy, which decreases their power consumption and carbon footprint.
Register Domain SA offers four shared hosting plans called Basic Hosting, Standard Hosting, Pro Hosting, and Premier Hosting. They all include unlimited traffic (with a very clear usage policy), unlimited databases and email accounts, as well as 500MB, 2.5GB, 10GB, and 25GB disk space respectively. All plans come with the MailScanner anti-spam system, an antivirus scanner, and remote webmail access.
As well as having fairly good resource quotas, the plans come with nice added value features. For beginners, all plans come with the Installatron one-click installer, pre-installation of WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal CMS, shopping cart tools, and a three-page Weebly website builder. For more advanced users, they also support PHP (unspecified version) and MySQL databases, but they do not support advanced coding languages such as Rails, Python, or Java.
Pricing and Support
Although the Basic and Standard plans are quite affordable, and generally in line with local and international competitors, the Premier and Pro plans are quite expensive, especially given they don’t support many advanced features. SSL certificates and domain registration both cost extra.
You have the option to buy hosting for either one month or one year, and the price decreases slightly if you choose to purchase one year upfront. They provide a generous 30-day money-back guarantee, although it is tucked away in their terms and conditions.
I am impressed by their knowledge base that has a good number of documents and a network status page. Although they have local Cape Town and Johannesburg telephone numbers, they appear to prefer support requests to be submitted by ticket. While it would nice to see a few additional support options, at least they are quick to respond to tickets.
