Are you looking for the best VPS hosting in South Africa? If yes, then you have come to the right place. At SA Broadband, we have explored a number of the services that are on offer out there and we can safely give advice to our readers. VPS hosting is short for Virtual Private Server hosting. It’s an option that you will need to explore as your business or site grows. As a matter of fact, this very website is hosted on a VPS. So, what is the best Virtual Private Server in South Africa?
Best Virtual Private Server in South Africa
The table below outlines some of the best VPS hosting options that are available for South Africans. For our analysis, we will assume that at the very basic level, everyone needs 1GB of Memory and 1TB Bandwidth. Storage can be varied depending on your needs.
| VPS Host | Starting Price/m | Features | Explore |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vultr | $6 (about R112) | 1 vCore 1GB RAM 1 TB Bandwidth 32 GB NVMe SSD Unmanaged | Get Bonus |
| Truehost | R155 | 1 vCore 1GB RAM 10GB SSD Storage Managed | Explore |
| Cloud | R100 | 2 vCores 4GB Memory 80GB SSD Storage Unlimited Bandwidth | Explore |
These providers have South African data centres
Those are the three best VPS hosting options that you will be able to find in South Africa. One thing to note is that in this post, we only looked at options that provide South African data centres.
It’s an important consideration. When hosting your plugin or your website, you want to be able to do on servers that are as near to your audience as is possible.
As an example, our own websites get 90% of their traffic from South Africa. It means we need to have our sites hosted as close to our audience as is possible.
But why is it important? It all has to do with latency. When it comes to loading a page, the longer it takes for that to happen, the more likely that people are going to leave without converting.
The same applies when it comes to mobile apps and other services. Latency is also important for those providing gaming services. Being close to your audience can cut down on the time that it takes for the service to load.
However, all is not black and white here. What we have discovered is that sometimes, European data centres are better than those in South Africa. Also note that companies like Vultr and Truehost, you have the option to choose a European data centre or one in another part of the world.
The reason why some offshore data centres may end up performing could be because of issues to do with infrastructure in South Africa. As an example, there is a lot of load shedding these days.
While most data centres in the country have backup generators, it’s not inconceivable that your site or app may be offline for some time every now and again.
Our story with these providers
This article is dedicated to showing you the best VPS hosting in South Africa. We gave you three options. We have a story to tell with 2 of these. So, we will do so here and it should help you decide.
Truehost
This website and several others that we own is currently hosted on a Truehost VPS. However, we are in the process of migrating. You will understand why a bit later.
We started this site on a Truehost shared hosting plan. Everything was great and our site grew exponentially. It was only later that we discovered that Truehost’s shared hosting servers are in South Africa.
But we have already noted that that can be an advantage. It means you will have much more stable infrastructure. To be fair, our site on their shared servers performed really well. We never even had any down time to talk about.
At some point, it was decided that our site was outgrowing shared hosting. We, therefore, took the decision to move to the Truehost South African VPS. Bad decision.
The South African VPS leaves a lot to be desired to be frank. Our site is constantly going down. Speed was greatly reduced and the site stopped growing.
Admittedly, there could be other factors behind this. As an example, we also stopped growing partly because we started doing ads with Ezoic. They load a site with so many ads that it gets rather slow.
So, it’s a raft of factors that could have contributed to our downfall. But the South African VPS has been less than ideal for us, which is why we are moving our sites. So, where are we going?
Vultr
Vultr is an international host that has data centres in South Africa. So, they are not primarily South African. If you look across the internet, you will discover that Vultr is probably the fastest host that you will be able to find out there.
Countless tests against the likes of Linode and Contabo shows that Vultr is the best. So, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that we can enjoy this performance using data centres right here in South Africa.
We have been using them for a few months now and performance has been great. So far, we only have our SA Banking website on our chosen package, but we are getting ready to move all our sites to the Vultr VPS.
What makes Vultr special is that they offer High Performance and High Frequency servers. They also offer NVMe SSD storage, which is way faster than normal SSD storage. And speed is right at the top when it comes to having a successful website or a successful app. A slow website does not rank that well on search engines.
How much is 10GB of data at Vodacom?
Summary
In this article, we showed you the best VPS hosting in South Africa. There are many options out there. We were mostly focused on unmanaged VPS. However, most of the providers outlined above also offer managed VPS. That’s important if you don’t have the technical knowledge to run your own VPS.
Vultr does not offer managed VPS, but they are the best in our view. They have a South African data centre, putting them near your customers if you are in the country. That cuts down on latency, which is great for the performance of your website or application.