Best Domain Hosting South Africa

Are you looking for the best domain hosting options in South Africa? A lot of people in the country are looking to create their own websites. It could be for their businesses, or it could be individuals looking to get into blogging. Whatever the reasons for creating your own site, you need to register a domain as a starting point. There are many domain registration companies out there, almost all of which also offer web hosting services. So, what cheap domain registration companies can be found in South Africa?

Cheap domain registration companies South Africa

The best domain registration company in South Africa is currently Truehost. It should be your go to place for cheap South African domains. Their domain registration fee currently stands at R60 per year for a .co.za domain. Meanwhile, a .com domain will cost you R129 per month. The table below shows some of the best cheap domain registration companies that can be found in South Africa;

What is a domain?

Those are the best domain hosting companies in South Africa. But what is a domain name? You may be wondering about this. Domain names identify different websites on the internet. There are currently over a billion websites out there. Each of these sites has a different domain name.

We have already mentioned that when creating a website, a domain is one of the first things that you will need to think about. What are you going to call your website? This site is called SA Broadband. Our domain name is sabroadband.co.za.

When someone types that into the address bar on a browser, they get taken to our website. You can see from our own example that our domain is related to our business name. Because we are called SA Broadband, our domain is naturally sabroadband.co.za.

The last bit, the .co.za denotes that our domain focuses on South Africa. A .com website on the other hand is pretty much international. When creating a website, it pays to try to localize it as much as is possible. That’s because Google and other search engines give priority to local sites for local queries.

How to choose a domain

For a number of reasons, choosing a domain is not always as simple as it should be. That’s something that we need to mention in this article on the best domain hosting for South Africa. We have already given a pretty good example of how to pick a domain.

But what do you do in the event that somebody else has already registered the domain that you wish to take? That’s what usually happens in any case. There are a lot of people out there who are in the business of registering and parking interesting domain names.

There are several options should you find yourself in this situation. If the person who has registered the domain is willing to let it go, you can buy it from them. Otherwise, you will have to come up with a variation on a domain name.

In most instances, people use their company names as domains. So, if your company is called Example, you can use that as your domain. Should you find that example.com is already taken, you can try another domain name. You can use any of the above companies to search for a domain.

Learn how to verify your website with Google in South Africa.

Do you also need to buy hosting at the same company?

Is it necessary to buy a domain and web hosting from the same company? That’s something that a lot of people wonder about as they hunt around for the best domain hosting in South Africa. Does it even matter what you do?

Our answer is, it’s not a must. However, for the sake of your sanity, it’s usually better to have everything in one place. What do we mean by that? Yes, you can buy your web hosting from company A and your domain from company B, but you will have difficult managing everything as you go along.

That becomes even more acute as you get more websites. Let’s assume that you are a blogger. As your site portfolio grows, it becomes rather cumbersome to keep everything in different places.

To explain further, there are several tasks that are necessary as far as managing your website is concerned. You need to pay the annual domain registration fee. You need to pay for your web hosting. Your life becomes easier if you are making your payments from one place.

As an example, this website is hosted by a company called Truehost. Our domain was previously hosted elsewhere. However, we moved it here and that has made our life easy because we make our domain and web hosting payments at the same time and from one dashboard.

Do domain names matter to SEO?

This is another thing that you may be asking yourself while looking for the best domain name hosting company in South Africa. We have already noted that there are many cheap domain registration companies in the country. Now we go back to domain names and their relevancy to SEO.

It used to be that people would choose names that had their focus keywords in them. So, a website about pet tarantulas would be called pettarantulas.co.za or .com. Google would look at this and would award a better rank to such a site on pet tarantula related searches.

However, it’s no longer really necessary to have a keyword in your domain as part of your SEO. For all it matters, pettarantulas.com can talk about the latest jet engine and if the article is well written and follows all the SEO tenets, it will still rank higher than a poorly written article on thelatestjetengine.com.

So, content matters more than domain name. Having said that, it only makes logical logic for a company’s website to have a domain that makes it easy to be identified with the company. It wouldn’t be wise and professional to have your company website thelatestjetengine.com when you buy and sell apples.

Summary

In this article, we showed you the best cheap domain hosting companies in South Africa. We noted that a domain name is how people will find your site.

You need to pay an annual domain registration fee to keep it alive. We also noted that you can buy your domain separately or together with your hosting.

The latter option is the best in our view because it means you will be able to manage your accounts from one interface.

Before you go, check out our post on the cheapest web hosts in South Africa