Host Africa, a leading pan-African web hosting company headquartered in Cape Town, is supporting over 100,000 customers, expanding its footprint and rolling out an ever-increasing suite of services following its migration to premier data centre partner Digital Parks Africa (DPA).
Host Africa started migrating services and customers to DPA’s facilities three years ago, to accommodate a growing customer base. Michael Osterloh, MD of Host Africa, says that while the initial move was intended to provide the company with a secondary data centre, DPA is rapidly becoming the primary data centre for new services. This is largely due to DPA’s exceptional local support.
10,000 customers successfully migrated with zero downtime
Osterloh says Host Africa opted to migrate some of its cloud services to DPA because of DPA’s flexibility and support. “We had to do this live, to avoid interruptions for our customers. DPA offered us flexibility in the costs associated with running two data centres simultaneously, making a good business case for migrating the customers without the risk of downtime. The move was accomplished with no service interruptions for the 10,000 customers who were migrated initially. Over time, Host Africa has scaled up our services with DPA, launching new products such as colocation services within the DPA data centre.”
In the three years since migrating to DPA, Host Africa has experienced no interruptions or downtime, which is crucial for its customers.
Hands-on, local support
“However, while all Tier 3 data centres offer good uptime, the differentiator with DPA is its flexibility and local support,” he says. “If something happens it is important that you have immediate access to the service personnel, technicians and even the finance department. This is crucial for us, and DPA delivers. If we have an emergency, we don’t want to queue for support from an offshore support team. The most critical thing for us is to have direct access to their on-ground team, which allows us to offer superior service to our own customers.”
Osterloh notes that its customers across Africa typically prefer to be hosted locally. “We are not a global brand – we focus on pan-Africa, therefore we serve our customers directly in their markets in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. They benefit from fast, local support in their own countries, and this localisation is one of the factors that differentiates us from big global brands,” he says.
Meeting local market needs has enabled Host Africa to grow strongly and build a loyal customer base. The company is currently rated number one for web hosting on South Africa’s HelloPeter, and customers cite Host Africa’s reliability and support as key reasons for their loyalty.
Host Africa now offers a range of solutions including virtual servers, dedicated servers, domain names, cloud servers and shared hosting.
“While DPA ticks all the boxes in terms of security and standards, what makes them outstanding is their service levels,” Osterloh says. “They made an extra effort to get us on board and also to keep us happy as a customer. Compared to the other data centres that we host with, DPA is really exceptional in terms of service, and it’s their customer-first approach that has made them a stand-out partner amid other providers”
“Having ‘remote hands’ is very important for us, and DPA differentiates from many other providers by going beyond what you normally expect from a data centre. As a medium-sized hosting business, we need extra services and support here and there, and DPA simply makes it happen. This makes the partnership very attractive to us. It’s why we’re confident DPA will support our next phase of growth,” he says.
Digital Parks Africa is Africa’s premier data centre provider, recognised for their excellence in redundancy, scalability, and innovation. This partnership is exactly the kind of success story DPA aims to replicate across the continent. As a 100% African-owned data centre provider, we understand what it takes to support businesses with world-class infrastructure, tailored for local conditions.