Want to know the top 10 best web hosting companies in Kenya? I will give you a quick list – my top 10 – and then give you more details on how to get a domain name and hosting for a website or blog you may want to start soon.

Here is my top ten hosting companies in Kenya:

• Kenya Web Experts
• HostPinnacle
• HOSTAFRICA / Sasahost
• deepAfrica
• Tupoa Hosting
• Truehost
• Webhost Kenya
• hostPoa
• Skyhost
• Peak and Dale

List of popular web hosting companies in Kenya

You might have looked at my top ten list above and not seen a particular company listed.

Below I will just give you a quick list of all the popular web hosting companies I have come across when researching the best web hosting companies on Google Search, Bing and Duckduckgo.

HostFiti
FBrand Web Hosting
Kenya Hosting Experts
Mambo Microsytems
Webcom Kenya
Buy Domain Kenya
Mango Web Hosting
Web Host Experts Kenya / IT Experts Web Hosting
Tupoa Hosting
Intrepid
Bitsimba
Orawebhost
Shujaa Host
Afriqnetworks
Kenya Web
Afriregister
Web4Africa
Website Hosting Kenya
Webscreations Design
Movetech Solutions Ltd
Move Host
Hostnali
Lenasi
Swiftweb Technologies
Telkom Kenya
Safaricom Plc
HOSTMASTERS
EHOST KENYA
EAC Directory
Kenya Web Experts
HostPinnacle Kenya
HOSTAFRICA / Sasahost
deepAfrica Limited
Truehost Kenya / Truehost Cloud
Webhost Kenya
hostPoa
Skyhost
Peak and Dale

What do I need a web hosting company for? What can they help me do?

A web hosting company will help you:

• register a domain name for your site.
• get space where your site’s files will be stored
• help you get an SSL certificate to secure all communication between your site and site visitors

These are the main things you will expect from whichever hosting company you decide to use to set your online presence through your very own blog or website.

The services you are likely to get fall under these categories:

Domain registration. Popular domain extensions / TLDs in Kenya when registering a domain: .com, .co.ke, .ac.ke, .ke, .org, .info, .co, .net and .biz. Get the popular .co.ke and .com extensions for KSh 1200 – 1600 / year.

Web hosting. You can usually get a good Starter shared hosting plan to start you off. Expect to pay Kenya Shillings 2100 – 3100 per year – or about KSh 220 monthly. Some hosts charge more and some less.

Reseller hosting. Perfect for people who want to make money in the hosting business for example designers and developers or just anyone who wants to start a hosting company. Charges vary. You can get a good reseller hosting plan for KSh 2000 to KSh 3500 / year.

VPS hosting. For webmasters getting more traffic to their sites that want to move away from shared hosting but still don’t want to commit to paying for dedicated servers.

Dedicated servers. For website owners that get a lot of unique visitors or pageviews on their websites, e-commerce sites or blogs and want servers robust enough to make whatever application they use on their sites run smoothly.

Windows hosting. For clients who don’t want to use Linux hosting – which is the common type of hosting sold by mist hosting companies.

Email hosting. For branded emails – emails with the company name in them. Something official. Something without Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook in them.

Web design. This is optional. But for clients that wan to invest money on a good design – custom design work – rather than just use a theme or template that is already available on the internet for free use or as a paid theme.

Bulk SMS. Optional service too for those using SMS to market their products or services / engage with their customers.

Digital marketing. Optional service too. Search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, content writing, Pay per click ad setup & management (on Facebook and Google Ads platform in particular).

What is a good web hosting plan for a starter site for small businesses?

One that has enough disk space, monthly bandwidth, good uptime guarantee, has cPanel, MySQL databases, has good RAM (fast servers), allows you to set up email accounts, has email storage, allows you to backup your site, gives you FTP access, comes with the free Let’s Encrypt SSL and is affordable.

So, for example the Starter hosting plan by Kenya Web Experts for small websites / blogs: 30 GB disk space, 300 GB bandwidth at KSh 3,100 per year.

Or the Starter hosting plans by HostPinnacle Kenya: 35GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth at KSh 2,999 per year.

What kind of web hosting plan should I get if I want to start a blog?

Just get a Starter plan like the ones I have mentioned from Kenya Web Experts and HostPinnacle.

The Starter hosting plans have free script installers like Softaculous which can use to quickly start a WordPress blog.

What kind of web hosting do I need as a business owner that wants to venture in e-commerce – launch an online shop?

Get a Starter plan from a good host with bigger plans that you can easily migrate to later down the road if you see the need to upgrade to say a bigger shared hosting plan, VPS server or a dedicated server.

Any Starter plan that can run some of the popular shopping cart software like Opencart, Magento or WooCommerce should be fine.

What will I get when I pay money to a web hosting company?

• A domain name
• Web space that will hold all your site’s files (the pages, blog posts, PDF files images, and databases)
• A service to install SSL certificate on your site
• A script installer to easily install software such as WordPress, Opencart among other content management systems.

Which non-Kenya hosting companies and domain registrar’s are popular in Kenya?

Bluehost
HostGator
Namesilo
Namecheap

How can I pay for web hosting services in Kenya?

• Lipa na M-PESA
• Credit cards and debit cards / ATM cards
• PayPal
• Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa, MTN and Vodacom M-PESA. Good options for Kenyans and even people from Uganda and Tanzania that turn to web hosting companies in Kenya to create their websites or blogs.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum if you prefer paying using cryptocurrencies.

What happens once I pay for a domain and hosting plan

You get instant activation for the service you pay for. And once your domain has propagated (it usually takes 30 minutes sometimes more), you can start setting up your site.

You can setup your site yourself or ask the hosting company to help you build your website / create your blog and make it go live on the internet. Of course you will help them come up with content to add to your site.

You can also create your company email and manage it with the following apps inside cPanel: Roundcube or SquirrelMail.

What popular content management systems do Kenyans use to run their websites and blogs?

WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, WooCommerce, Magento, Opencart, AbanteCart, Zencart, Prestashop, phpBB, SMF, MyBB, MediaWiki among others.

To start a website or blog where I can add an online shop, what can a web hosting company help me with?

• Setting up the online shop itself: adding SSL, the necessary pages, product pages and images and product prices.
• Free M-PESA integration. Connecting your online shop to payment gateways such as Kopo Kopo Lipa na M-PESA, Jambopay, iPay, Pesapal among others.
• Setting up a live chat app on your website.
• Helping you set up Facebook ads or Google Ads to promote your products or services.

What is your favourite web hosting company in Kenya?

What is your favourite web hosting company in Kenya? Out of the list I created above, what would you say is your favourite host? To help you narrow down on a single company (or a few companies), I will list some things that might help you reach a decision.

You might like a hosting company based on their pricing

Depending on the project you are working on (starting a blog, a company website or online shop), you might come across started shared hosting plans from 2 or 3 hosting companies with more less the same disk quota / space and bandwidth. One might go for KSh 2100 / year. Another might go for KSh 3100 per year.

Based on the pricing, you might settle on one (not necessarily the cheapest) over the other, based on what you think will serve your needs as a webmaster best.

If it is a simple blog / website, you might start with the cheapest option you find on the market. For a site that might become a little busier right out of the bat (say an online shop where you send traffic from paid ads via Facebook advertising or Google Ads), you might want to for the option where you are charged more – so you can get a higher number in disk space and bandwidth.

You might like a hosting company based on their addon features

Again, when you come across two or three similarly priced hosting plans, you might decide to buy the one that in the end guarantees you more features.

The features might include:

-backups (daily, weekly or monthly backups of your site – done for you automatically)

-addon domains (hosting plan that doesn’t restrict you to just using one domain name. You can pay more for a hosting plan with this feature knowing that when you use the plan for multiple sites / domains, it will in the end still cost less compared to plans that restrict you to just using one domain per hosting account)

-domain ID protection (protection for your WHOIS records from prying eyes that seek such information for their spam campaigns).

You might like a hosting company based on their ease of use

Factors that matter here include:

-Dashboards that are easy to use. It could be the hosting company’s dashboard (where users register domains, buys and pays for extra services like SSL, hosting and more). Or it could just be all about how their cPanel dashboard looks like. And how their one-click script installer looks and works.

You might like a hosting company based on their support

Factors people consider here usually revolves around the following:

-what channels a hosting company provides for their prospects and clients. And one might be drawn to one company over another based on the methods they avail to their clients to get in touch with them (via phone, live chat on their websites, support tickets via the dashboard made available to clients, or email).

-responsiveness. How quickly one company replies to messages / and solves problems / issues can also be a great differentiator between hosting companies.

My turn.

What is my favourite web hosting company in Kenya?

I have used many of them – and love them for various reasons. Here are some of them – and the reasons why I regard them highly.

Kenya Web Experts. I like their starter hosting plans, even though it is a bit pricier compared to the offering by some of the hosting companies mentioned in this article. For Kenya Shillings 3100 a year, you get to host one domain with them.

HostPinnacle, I like this company for having all the features offered by Kenya Web Experts. And to make things even more enticing for prospective clients, they offer addon domain names in their KSh 1999 per year shared hosting plan. And that’s not all, buyers of their hosting plans also get to register a domain name for free – whenever they purchase hosting from the company.

What I don’t like about it is that it’s fast but not from what I have seen using Kenya Web Experts. On top of that I have seen reports from my Jetpack downtime monitoring tool, that sometimes some of my sites can suffer a few minutes of outage, something I rarely saw with Kenya Web Experts. Overall, it’s a good host.

HOSTAFRICA / Sasahost. I like this company for their cheap monthly shared hosting plans. When using HOSTAFRICA (which acquired Sasahost), you can just pay for a month or three months of hosting. You are not forced to commit a whole year’s worth of hosting fees upfront. This is perfect for anyone who might be interested in blogging / launching a website or online shop, while committing just a few hundreds of shillings per month (say KSh 420) in web hosting.

Having written all this, what might be a person’s favourite hosting company depends a lot on the project they are working on, their budget, and their know-how when it comes to matters hosting and running sites.

In conclusion, when deciding on which hosting company to go with…

Just look for these things:

• That a company offers good customer support
• Has a money back guarantee (a 30 day or 45 day money back guarantee on hosting in case you are not satisfied with their service)
• The company gives sufficient backup and storage space for their clients
• The company has a 99% plus uptime guarantee. The fewer the service interruptions are the better.
• The company offers instant setup. So, once you pay for a domain and hosting, you can just in 30 minutes to an hour be busy building your site yourself.

That’s it.

Go to the web hosting companies in Kenya category on Niabusiness to find more awesome articles on domains and hosting in Kenya.

Thanks for reading.

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