Uptime & reliability

Good quality hosting that is very stable

Performance, Speed, Security, Morality, and Experience. These five pillars are at the heart of Jambonex’s reliability claim, and for pretty good reason. They guarantee 99.9% uptime of their servers, all of which run on fail-safe RAID-10 disk drives that stay up even in case of failure. All of their servers are connected to the best internet providers in the region — meaning Tier1 connections all the way through with clean IP addresses and top notch hardware. There are daily scans on their servers for malware, keeping your website safe from any hackers who may try to infect it. If you plan on hosting illegal or immoral content (pornography included), you might as well look elsewhere, as they screen all content and will immediately shut down any account that hosts any. Combine that with years of experience and a dedicated staff.

To add on to that, they have a 30-day money back guarantee, so even though you pay for a year, you will get a full refund if you decide you don’t like their services within the first 30 days, minus the cost of an non-refundable domain registration.

Also, if you plan on hosting any religious content, due to the nature of the region, you MUST abide by their faith proclamation on their terms of service. Any religious websites that differ or oppose their statement of faith will be permanently shut down and deleted without warning. While that doesn’t sound reliable, if you’re not breaking the terms, there’s nothing to worry about.

Features

Quality features for most basic websites

Jambonex’s hosting plans must be bought with a year contract — you pay one low annual fee rather than a monthly fee. The low end plan includes 2GB disk and 20GB bandwidth. The highest shared hosting plan available itself only has 40GB disk and 400GB bandwidth, though that should be plenty for just about anybody. You get a free .com, .net, or .org domain name with the purchase of any hosting plan. In addition, they all come with unlimited e-mails, MySQL databases, and FTP accounts — all with a free setup.

With Jambonex’s reseller plan, you can go the low-end route that includes 5GB disk and 100GB data, with the ability to create 10 cPanel accounts. On the high end, their best reseller plan includes 60GB disk and 600GB data with unlimited cPanel accounts possible. You get private name servers with any reseller account to go along with a whole range of features that WHM offers, to which you just can’t do with a standard shared plan.

They also have one VPS plan available that you can get with cPanel, DirectAdmin, or Plesk, to go along with one free dedicated IP. Unfortunately their VPS server is limited to a standard 512MB RAM and 20GB disk, though you can purchase additional RAM and disk space for an added fee.

Support

Decent support with limited contact options

Jambonex has two main medians for support: Online live chat and ticket system. The chat is more for basic sales and setup questions, while the ticket system is where technicians actually help with complex issues you may have. They don’t list a support phone number, not even a local Kenyan one, but they do list an address to their office, so if you happen to be in town, they are open from 8AM – 5PM Monday to Friday, which is usually the time their live chat is open as well. They also have a small knowledgeable (less than 20 articles) answering some basic questions regarding domains, hosting, payments, and more.

Pricing

Good pricing for basic services. A little expensive for VPS

While you must purchase all of their plans for an entire year, whether it’s shared or reseller hosting, as well as Virtual Servers, you end up getting a steal of a price in return. Their basic plan only costs Kes 4,000 per year, and the 2GB disk is more then enough for your standard website. That comes out to only Kes 333 per month, which in US dollars is equal to less than $4 monthly. The Kes 20,000 plan, which is their top shared plan that includes 40GB disk and 400GB data, comes out to about $18 a month, which is still pretty affordable.

On the reseller side, the top plan I previously mentioned with 600GB bandwidth & unlimited accounts also runs for Kes 20,000 yearly, which in my opinion is the best plan they offer. That’s an extremely cheap price for a reseller account..just having two or three clients pays for itself. The VPS they offer costs a huge amount — Kes 50,000, which runs up to nearly $50 a month for a basic plan that has 512MB RAM. At the same time, it’s not easy to find a virtual private server in Kenya so if that’s what you need, they have it.

Summary

Nice web hosting for those in Africa

The web hosting industry in Africa is just starting to pick up, but they’re all far behind Jambonex, who had been leading Kenya’s way since 2006. While all of their plans must be purchased with a full year contract, they are affordable, include a free domain name, and include all the features you want. They have very affordable plans all around to go along with the best hardware in the country and a dedicated support team.

Pros:

• 30-day money back guarantee
• Quality hosting for Kenya & African audiances
• Affordable prices for shared plans
• Excellent reseller rates
• Free domain name with all hosting packages

Cons:

• VPS is overpriced
• Strict limitations on what type of sites you can host
• No monthly plans.  Must pay annually.