Choosing a web host is one of the most important decisions for your website. Your host decides how fast your site loads, how often it goes down, how secure it is, and how quickly problems get fixed. Here is how to choose the best web hosting for a Zimbabwean business.
Local vs international hosting
Hosting with a Zimbabwean or regional provider can mean local support, payment in a familiar way, local invoicing and good speeds for visitors inside Zimbabwe. International hosting often offers larger infrastructure and more plan options, and works well for audiences in the diaspora. Many businesses get the best of both by combining good hosting with a content delivery network (CDN), which serves files from locations closer to each visitor.
The types of hosting
- Shared hosting: affordable; your site shares a server with others. Fine for small company sites.
- VPS hosting: dedicated resources on a virtual server. Better for busy sites, online shops and systems.
- Cloud hosting: resources spread across many servers for reliability and easy scaling.
- Dedicated servers: a whole machine for your organisation, for large, high-traffic or sensitive systems.
- Managed WordPress hosting: optimised for WordPress, often with automatic updates, caching and backups.
What to look for in a hosting provider
- Uptime: ask about their uptime record and what happens when a server fails.
- Speed: solid-state storage, recent PHP versions, server-level caching and CDN support.
- Security: free SSL certificates, firewalls, malware scanning and isolation between accounts.
- Backups: daily automatic backups kept off-server, and an easy way to restore them.
- Business email: reliable mailboxes on your own domain, with spam filtering.
- Support: real people who answer quickly, ideally by phone and WhatsApp as well as email.
- Payment and invoicing: payment methods you can actually use and proper invoices for your accounts.
- Room to grow: an easy upgrade path as your traffic grows.
Warning signs
- “Unlimited everything” for a very low price, which usually means overcrowded servers.
- No backups, or backups that cost extra to restore.
- Your domain registered in the host’s name instead of yours.
- Slow or no support when something breaks.
Which hosting does your business need?
- Small company profile site: quality shared or managed WordPress hosting.
- Online shop or busy blog: managed WordPress hosting or a VPS.
- School portals, e-learning or custom systems: VPS or cloud hosting.
- Multiple client or company sites: a VPS or reseller plan.
Let us handle it
Web Entangled provides managed web hosting, VPS servers, domains and business email for Zimbabwean organisations, with backups, SSL and support from our Harare team. Read more in our guide to cloud hosting, or request a quotation.