Uganda: Sneak Peek into the Digitalising Uganda with Dickson Mushabe, CEO & Founder, Hostalite

Hostalite is a hosting provider and a software development company in Uganda, a rapidly digitising company in Africa. As the country is going online by leaps and bounds, hosting and website builder businesses emerge and thrive. To understand this process better, we met with Dickson Mushabe, the CEO and founder of Hostalite, to talk about everything shared hosting and Internet in Uganda.

Uganda and Hosting Potential

Digitalisation in Uganda

In the words of Dickson, Uganda is going online and does so very fast. Hostalite, a company running in several countries, and other companies are shifting the idea in the Ugandan market about selling a website.

People who use Facebook or Gmail for their online needs do see having a professional website as a necessity. But this perception has started to shift recently: people running businesses start to see them as a need. The economy of the country is growing, and there is a wish to have professional websites as part of the digitisation process. Internet penetration is growing very fast, through mobile phones and also personal computers, and because of this, there is huge potential for hosting companies.

Shared Hosting in Numbers

44 million people live in Uganda, and the Internet penetration rate is 60%. Big cities have the Internet, and people there embrace the technology. Smaller cities and villages have less access to the Internet, but as the Internet penetration rate is growing, remote regions get connected too.

Support and Accessibility

The affordable pricing of hosting is why the business is so accessible. At the same time, many companies brought down the pricing at the expense of service quality. “What separates these companies is the reliability: how reliable are they? Do they have support, can you call them in the middle of the night if you have a problem, or are they a one-month company?” Hostalite runs 24/7 support, trying to solve the issues as quickly as possible. “Website is supposed to serve the community. We host your website, we showcase your products, we guarantee 99.8% uptime, so we need to be there for the clients,” mentions Dickson.

Currently, there are larger companies advertising their services in Uganda, but local businesses aim to keep the hosting in the country, as it will be better for the economy.

Pricing and Payments

TLD is around $50/year, which is quite expensive. Many companies work with the government to reduce prices, but it takes time. On the other hand, the average price of hosting is $2-3/month, which is cheaper than in many countries. When people buy hosting, they usually get one website as well. The case of one boater buying 20 domains is very rare. For the payments, the country has its own telecoms that support payments, as well as mobile money payment options, are available.

Website Builders in Uganda

Website builders in Uganda are just starting as a trend. People are used to others developing websites for them. However, as Dickson mentions, now they learn more and are being exposed to technology, and start to understand that it can make their lives better. 'People naturally prefer to use free builders, but they won’t sacrifice the quality at the expense of cheaper price.'

They also prefer to go with cloud-based hosting, which is more reliable. However, hosting locally can help the country’s economy. 'In web hosting, a hosting company tends to promise reliability and support. Support is the trick. Customers often don’t even have the knowledge of how to add a phone number or email, so they have a need for support all the time. Even if there are things that sound too obvious, do it for your client. This is also why the website import tool is great. If people could easily move a website from one place to another, that’d be a dream come true. Because moving websites is a hassle, if you have websites in other site makers, it’s a nightmare. Once people realise they can move websites easily, it’s freedom.'

Final Thoughts

As Uganda navigates its digital development, it becomes a more and more fascinating place for shared hosting businesses. With millions of people yet to connect to the Internet and go online with their business, it offers a lot of opportunities to not only get a slice of their shared hosting market but also see the fascinating process of a country’s digitisation from scratch.