Domains, Web Hosting and VPS Hosting for Businesses in Africa

A domain is your website’s address, such as yourbusiness.co.ke. Web hosting is the service that stores your website files and email and delivers them to visitors. You need both for a working website. You can buy them from the same provider or from different ones, as long as the domain points to your hosting.

At the time of writing, a .co.ke domain costs roughly KES 1,000 to KES 1,500 a year at many Kenyan registrars, depending on the registrar and any offers. Check the renewal price as well as the first-year price, and make sure the domain is registered in your name.

Yes. KeNIC, Kenya’s domain registry, says any company or individual can register a .ke domain through an accredited registrar. Academic, school and government endings such as .ac.ke, .sc.ke and .go.ke need supporting documents. Non-profits should use .or.ke.

Many Kenyan hosts and registrars accept M-Pesa. Most global hosts, including Hostinger’s global site, bill in US dollars and accept cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay or crypto instead. If M-Pesa is your only option, choose a local host. We can help you pick one.

Hostinger is good value for small business websites, WordPress and budget VPS hosting. At the time of writing, its data centres are in Europe, Asia, the United States and Brazil, not Africa. It uses a content delivery network with a location in Johannesburg. This works well for most business websites. Apps that need the fastest local speeds may suit a host with servers in your country.

Shared web hosting places many websites on one server and handles the technical work for you. A VPS gives you a guaranteed share of a server, with its own resources and full control. Web hosting is simpler and cheaper. A VPS is more powerful and flexible, but someone has to manage it.

A VPS helps if you run expert advisers or trading platforms that must stay online around the clock. Choose a Windows VPS if your platform needs one, and place the server close to your broker’s trading server to reduce delay. If you trade manually from your phone or laptop, you do not need one.

For learning or testing, sometimes. For a business, rarely. Free hosts limit storage, speed and email, and they can close with little notice. 000webhost, one of the best-known free hosts, shut down in 2024. A low-cost paid plan with backups, SSL and support is a safer base for a business.

You can use a free webmail address, but it will not carry your business name. For professional email such as [email protected], you need a domain. Once you have one, you can use email from your hosting plan, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

Yes. We move websites, databases, email and DNS records, test everything and time the switch to avoid downtime. Many hosts, including Hostinger, offer free migration for WordPress sites, and we will tell you when that is enough. We step in for email, custom sites and VPS moves.

You should. We register domains and hosting in your name or your company’s name, and you keep the login details. If you ever move to another provider or partner, everything goes with you.

No. We work with Hostinger, local accredited registrars and hosts, and cloud platforms including AWS and Microsoft Azure. We earn a commission on some links. We recommend the option that fits your needs, even when we earn nothing from it.

We serve clients in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Sudan and South Africa, and work remotely with clients across the continent. We are based in Nairobi, and support can be remote, on site or a mix of both.