Choosing web hosting from Africa

Hosting is the most misread line on a quote. It looks like a technical subscription, yet it decides three simple things: how fast the page arrives in Douala, who owns the site, and what happens the day you change provider. Here is how to choose from Cameroon or Central Africa, without paying for a server a showcase website does not need.

What hosting must guarantee

Four requirements, in this order:

1. The account is in the company’s name. Domain, hosting and mailboxes. The provider may run them; the provider does not own them. The day you leave, the credentials are transferred, not negotiated.
2. The page loads quickly from the clients’ country, not from the salesperson’s city. Measure in Douala, in Yaoundé, in Libreville, on a phone over 3G.
3. The site can be exported. Pages, images and copy come out as files someone else can take over. A builder that locks the site inside its own subscription is a rental, not hosting.
4. A backup has been restored at least once. A copy that has never been opened is not a backup.

These four points come up before anyone picks a brand. We also cover them when we set up the domain and email.

Do you need a server in Cameroon?

Not necessarily, and often not. A single server in Europe adds about 150 to 300 milliseconds to every request from Cameroon. That delay is felt. The answer is not to buy a machine in an office in Douala, often poorly connected to the rest of the network: it is to serve a copy of the page from a nearby point of presence, Johannesburg, Lagos or Nairobi, through a delivery network. The second visit then comes from cache and is almost instant.

That mechanism is described in more detail, with the page weight budget, in the guide to a fast website on a slow network. Hosting does not rescue an 8 MB page. It serves a page that is already light.

HuginMboa’s own site is hosted on Vercel, with pages served from a delivery network, and the account is in the studio’s name. It is the same criterion we apply to clients: you can read who hosts the site in the legal notice.

What it really costs

For a well-built showcase website, hosting sits between 0 and 60,000 FCFA a year. A .com domain adds about 10,000 to 15,000 FCFA a year, a little more for a .cm. Professional mailboxes, often forgotten, run from 0 to 40,000 FCFA a year per address.

An offer at 200,000 FCFA a year for a six-page site is rarely justified. It usually pays for a dedicated server the traffic does not need, or a margin presented as engineering. The opposite trap is free hosting that gives no access and no export: the real price is paid at the redesign.

These ranges come from our practice, and they are also set out in how much a website costs in Cameroon. They are not a host’s price list: they are the lines that should appear on the quote, at cost.

Separate the domain, the site and email

Three distinct services fail less often than one bundle. The domain renews at a known registrar, with auto-renewal and a recovery email address the company actually reads. The site can live on a modern platform. Email can live elsewhere, with a mail provider, and does not have to move when the site moves.

The classic trap is the “domain + hosting + three addresses” bundle opened in the provider’s name and paid three years ahead. When the relationship ends, the domain is the hostage. Refuse that setup. Credentials are handed over at delivery, and the client stays the owner while we stay accountable for the running contract. The same frame applies to computer maintenance when the subject goes beyond the website and reaches the office computers.

What we check before recommending a host

The brand matters less than the measurement. Before proposing a host, we check:

• the response time of a light page from a Cameroonian mobile network;
• that the HTTPS certificate renews on its own;
• that a redirect can be added without a lost ticket;
• that error logs can be read;
• that the invoice is in the client’s name and can be cancelled.

A local host can be the right choice when it provides someone you can reach and a properly connected network. It is a poor choice when its only argument is “the server is in the country” and the page takes four seconds to start. Compare both on the same phone, the same day.

Moving host without breaking the site

The move is a rehearsal: copy the site to the new host, try it under a temporary name, switch the domain only when the pages, the forms and the redirects answer. Lower the DNS propagation delay first, warn people, switch at a quiet hour. The site should not vanish for an afternoon because email and the website shared an account that was closed too early.

If the current site is locked in a tool with no export, changing host is in fact a redesign. Name it as such, with its budget, rather than promising a “one-click migration”.

Review your hosting

Send the site address and say who currently holds the domain, the hosting and the email. We reply within 48 hours: what is in your name, what is not, and whether the slowness comes from the host or from the page itself. Write via the contact page.