Mweb today announced it is now offering uncapped and unlimited website hosting for only R19.00 per month, or free for one year if you are a MWEB DSL subscriber
When talking about hosting, uncapped and unlimited means that no additional costs will be incurred regardless of how many visitors your site has.
This uncapped offering is cheap in comparison to similar packages, as those on offer by www.hostingunlimited.co.za.
MWEB explains that uncapped hosting will “allow South Africans to put their business on the map with all the essential features in a secured shared hosting space”.
However, it is important to note a few things about these unlimited hosting packages:
1. Shared Hosting: Usually these service providers cram a lot of clients on the same server, meaning your website shares resources with other websites. This could potentially lead to poor performance. And no one likes to use a slow website.
2. Limit email addresses: The MWEB offering only offers 1 email address, which for most companies is not enough. You can, however, pay R20 extra per additional email address. Unfortunately, the total of all your email accounts may not exceed 100mb. Which is very little.
3. Linux hosting: While MWEB's website is still unclear on the specifics of their unlimited hosting package, these usually are Linux machines, which means websites coded in Microsoft's ASP.net will not be supported. Your website will have to be coded in something like PHP rather
4. No control panel: Mweb said on its Facebook page that users will not have some sort of Control Panel to configure their hosting. This means you have to contact their support team if you want to make any configurations
On the plus side, you do get a free .co.za domain name (your website's address). And your website will be hosted locally (i.e. not overseas), meaning it should theoretically be faster than similar servers hosted internationally. This also means users with local-only internet traffic can use your website.
But, for businesses serious about their web presence, I would rather recommend paying up to R60 per month and get a decent, limited hosting service. Usually these limited services provide traffic and disk space way above what your business' website will require, anyways. Plus you get more (usually unlimited amount of) email addresses, a control panel for proper configuration, and a faster performing website.
If you are serious about having your website well ranked with search engines, I will suggest using these cheap hosting packages to host a blog (i.e. Wordpress) and posting there regularly with links back to your business' actual website. This will increase your real business website's traffic significantly.
Until more users have used Mweb's new hosting plan, we won't know the quality of service. But 'till then, stick with what you know!
Ayoba Designs: Bloemfontein Web Design
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