Let’s say you’ve finally decided on this perfect web address (or domain name) for your site, and now you’re ready to start using it.
Before you can do much with your domain, you need to give it a home. Your web address needs to point to some server that’s going to serve the requests, such as a website, email address, file sharing and more.
Traditionally, you’d need to purchase a server, setup the server software you need, get an IP address from your internet provider and point your domain to it.
Luckily, those days are long gone and a web hosting company can handle all that for you. A web host can provide economical solutions over the traditional setup, where the web host is using the same environment to provide the service to many other website addresses.
This helps drive the cost low such that it doesn’t make any sense to go the traditional route anyway. These are called shared hosting plans, and are offered by all hosting companies including the likes of Extreme Web Technologies who have their hosting plans starting from just TShs. 9000/= per month.
Similarly, other hosting companies provide competitive packages and that makes choosing the right hosting company all the more difficult and confusing.
So how do you choose the right hosting company offer you? The simple answer is that it all depends on what your requirements are.
Are you looking for a motor bike, a car, mini van or a bulldozer? They’re all different types of vehicles for different purposes or use cases.
Similarly, if you don’t have a specific purpose — start with any shared hosting plan. The smallest plan should work just fine for most cases.
However, if you’re looking for something specific like email for business — then choosing the right provider becomes critical. You wouldn’t want to send out emails to prospective customers and not have them delivered for various reasons.
You’d need support, whether initial or on going basis to help you through the initial setup, remote computer configuration as well as support for any troubleshooting required in the future.
You’d need your hosting company to be established for atleast a couple of years, know what they’re doing and have a team who can be responsible for various issues.
There are hundreds of thousand of web hosting companies around the world. In Tanzania however, there are probably less than a hundred. Narrowing down, probably a few that primarily focus on web hosting specifically.
The others may focus on internet services, perhaps website design and development, marketing services and so forth – with web hosting being just one part of what they do. We were there once and decided to focus on web hosting to be able to deliver quality services.
Our brand, zesha, is Tanzania’s largest domain registration provider. We’re accredited by Tanzania Regulatory Authority Body (TCRA) which manages the dot TZ registry at www.karibu.tz. We serve over 6,000 domains accounting to roughly 25% of all dot TZ domains in Tanzania.
We’re still a very small team of handful people. We focus to strengthen our systems and automate our processes such that our customers can get self service through our website – end to end – from finding your perfect domain to completing your payment and automatically provisioning the services where possible.
