A hosting company with a mission to provide unparalleled levels of service, security, and prompt support, Softnet Solutions works hard to make a name in East Africa. It has a presence in Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Its website is in English only.
Features and Ease of Use
Softnet Solutions offers web solutions for individuals and businesses. It provides web hosting, VPS, domain registration, SSL, digital marketing, and website design.
Individuals and businesses have options in the web hosting packages. Some of the features include:
- 99.9% uptime
- Unlimited email accounts
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Anywhere from 25GB to unlimited storage space
Most businesses want to host their website and not have to deal with operating the hosting after the website is done, so things like backups don’t come to mind later on, despite how essential it is to take them. Softnet Solutions knows this, so in a separate plan – Corporate hosting – it offers businesses automatic backups. On this plan, you also get a free SSL certificate.
Developing a website isn’t everyone’s forte, despite many easy to use tools online. Softnet Solutions offers website design plans which also provide a free SSL certificate. If you’d rather design your website yourself but don’t know how, choose the Corporate plan where you get a free website builder. Otherwise, you can stick to one of the four basic shared hostings plans.
Softnet Solutions offers Linux operating system to shared hosting customers, and the control panel provided is cPanel. It’s fairly intuitive and if you haven’t used it before, there are numerous online guides that can help you.
Pricing and Support
Softnet Solutions offers a free hosting plan that provides 200MB storage space and 10GB bandwidth. This is sufficient for most basic websites. However, you can only use it if you buy your domain from this provider. I noticed that the domain cost is reasonable, unlike some companies that offset the cost of “free” hosting through domain prices.
This company has another hosting plan called Student Hosting. It’s suitable for blogs and simple websites with its 300MB storage space and 5000MB bandwidth. It’s affordable, but you have to buy a domain from the company as well before you can purchase this hosting plan.
The other shared hosting and corporate plans do not bore a hole in your pocket; they are low-cost for the features on offer. Keep in mind that it offers a free SSL certificate and domain, but only on a select few plans.
It also has VPS plans that run on SSD with RAID 10 and caching. Its prices are more in line with what the competition offers.
Softnet Solutions doesn’t have a knowledge base to help customers quickly solve issues by themselves. The support agents can be reached through email, ticketing system, phone, and live chat.
The vendor’s customer support doesn’t seem to be very effective. Despite my multiple attempts to contact them through phone and live chat support, I couldn’t reach anyone. Eventually, I resorted to sending an email, but unfortunately, I didn’t receive a response.
