There are specific web hosting companies you should avoid in Kenya. If you come across any of the companies with the following qualities, avoid them as much as possible.
Those who delete your domain name immediately it expires
A good hosting company will give a grace period of between 14 days to one month even after a domain expires. But there are hosting companies which do not care, they immediately delete your domain as it expires.
Before you even buy a domain name as a few questions, one of them being their domain expiry policy. If the grace period is 14 days to one month, then proceed to purchase the domain.
Court cases
What irritates most is when you have a case against government institutions or famous personalities, some hosting companies would witness in court to confirm that you are the owner of the domain and website. The same case happened with me in 2016 when EAC Directory witnessed against me when I had a case with Central Bank of Kenya. They proved beyond doubts that I owned the website instead of refusing to disclose the name of the owner.
Hosting companies like Bluehost will not reveal the identity no matter what but Kenyan companies will expose even without pressured to do so.
Money Back Guarantee
A client may purchase a plan from a local hosting company only to discover that the services rendered are not worth the price. In this case, they will demand for their money back. Good hosting companies have up to 30-day money back guarantee.
This is something you must ask before you buy a hosting plan from a local company.
Frequent downtime
Downtime is when websites are offline. I think you have witnessed many cases when you try to open a website, the message you get is that “resource limit reached” or website cannot be reached. In most cases, the issue is caused by the hosting company and not the website itself.
A good hosting company should have uptime of more than 99.95, meaning that in one year, issues will come once or twice.
Downtime affects traffic numbers as well as SEO.It’s highly advisable to avoid hosting companies with frequent downtime. The best way to know that a hosting company is not good is to check reviews online.
Hidden costs
Most hosting companies won’t tell you that they have hidden costs until you join. The public price indicated will change immediately you subscribe.
Before you choose any hosting company, ask whether they have hosting hidden costs. You can even ask their clients.
It’s extremely demoralizing when you are told to pay Ksh2,000 per year and when you buy their services, you are informed that there are other costs. Such companies aren’t good for website owners and you should avoid them completely.
Malware/virus security features
A good web hosting company must have away they protect their clients from malware and virus attacks. Hosting companies like Bluehost have SSL security and SiteLock which help to protect websites from malware and viruses. Viruses may destroy your website or slow you down.
Never host with a company that does not provide either SSL certificate or SiteLock
Customer service
A good web hosting company should have 24/7 customer service such that when you call even if it’s at 12 am, someone is there to help you.
To know how a company treats its customers, visit their social media pages and read the comments, if most of them are positive then that’s a good company.
Avoid companies with negative reviews.
Different types of hosting
If a hosting company does not have shared hosting, VPS and Dedicated Server services, avoid it.Shared Hosting plan is for small website while the other two are for medium and big websites. As your site grows, it requires more resources which are only offered under VPS and Dedicated structures.
Scalable resources
In common cases, hosting companies will suspend websites which exceed resources allocated. They don’t allow websites to spend more than the allocated resources. The cases are rampant especially when a website posts viral stories and traffic numbers explode.
Instead of allowing the website to use extra resources and get billed later on, the hosting companies suspend them. This is a bad policy and it should not be tolerated.
Sadly, almost all the hosting companies in Kenya apply the policy of suspending the website. The only hosting company I know that scale the resources is Kinsta.Though Kinsta is a bit expensive,it’s the friendliest hosting companies among all other companies in the world. You can check their plans here
Fast loading
One of the things that affect the SEO of a blog is the loading speed.If the speed is low,search engines will ensure that the website does not rank high. Always check whether websites hosted by a certain hosting company load at a high speed.
