Shared Hosting Built on LiteSpeed

Does your site belong on shared hosting?

With shared hosting, many websites live on one server and use its processor, memory and disk together. Splitting the cost of the machine is what keeps the price low. A server that would be expensive to rent on your own is divided among lots of customers, and your part of it starts at KSh 80$0.62 a month.

For the majority of sites, this is the right tool and not a second best. Think of a company brochure site, a blog, a portfolio, a church or school website, a small online shop or a WordPress site that gets a few thousand visits a month. Each of these runs well here, and a larger server would add nothing for them.

Some work does not suit it. You have outgrown shared hosting if you need root access or software installed at system level, if your application must have processor and memory reserved for it instead of a fair share, or if you run heavy traffic against a large database for long periods. At that point the honest recommendation is a VPS, and we will tell you so instead of selling you a plan that cannot keep up.

Choosing between the three plans

Storage rarely settles it, since most small sites use only part of even the smallest plan. The deciding question is how many separate websites you plan to run, as each one takes up its own slot on your account.

• Starter, KSh 80$0.62 per month or KSh 800$6.15 per year, which gives you 5GB of SSD storage and a single website. A good fit for one business site, a blog or a portfolio.
• Business, KSh 120$0.92 per month or KSh 1,200$9.23 per year, which gives you 10GB of SSD storage and 2 websites. A good fit if you also run a second site, a staging copy or a side project.
• Professional, KSh 250$1.92 per month or KSh 2,500$19.23 per year, which gives you 50GB of SSD storage and 5 websites. Suits agencies, people reselling their own services, and anyone looking after several client sites from one account.

Not sure? Begin with the smallest plan. Moving up takes moments from your dashboard, you are charged only the difference for the remaining time, and no files have to be moved. Starting small costs you nothing, and if it proves to be the wrong call, it is the cheaper one.

The platform behind every plan

The lowest-priced plan runs on exactly the same setup as the highest. Paying less never puts you on a slower tier.

• LiteSpeed web server. Under the same load it processes PHP considerably faster than Apache, and that accounts for most of the speed you notice on a WordPress site here.
• SSD storage only. The platform has no mechanical disks at all.
• DirectAdmin control panel. Manage files, databases, email, subdomains and DNS records, and install WordPress and other applications in one click.
• Any PHP from 5.6 to 8.3, chosen per site. This is more useful than it might seem. An older application that nobody has updated can stay on the version it needs, rather than failing when PHP moves on.
• Free SSL with automatic renewal. We issue and renew the certificates for you, so the padlock never lapses without you noticing.
• Backups every day, held for seven days. They run without you lifting a finger, and we can restore from them when something breaks.

How payment works

Prices here are displayed in US dollars. Because SiteBoma is a Kenyan company, the actual charge is made in Kenyan Shillings (KES), and your bank handles the conversion.

Checkout happens on Paystack's secure payment page, by card or by M-Pesa. Pick Visa or Mastercard, or pick M-Pesa, type in your M-Pesa number and approve the request that appears on your phone. Around five minutes after the payment clears, your account is set up automatically, with no screenshot to email and no office hours to wait for. Bank transfer can be arranged if you prefer it, and if the service turns out to be wrong for you, the seven-day money-back guarantee applies.

Bringing an existing site across

We move your site free of charge, and our team does the work. Once you have a plan, open a ticket. We copy over your files, databases and email accounts, then set things up so you can review the site on our servers before anything changes for the public.

You point your domain at us only when you are happy with what you see. Because the new copy is already serving before the domain changes, your visitors notice nothing during the switch. If you prefer, your domain can stay with its current registrar. It does not need to move along with the hosting.

Measured uptime, out in the open

Plenty of hosts print 99.9% on their pages without ever showing a number behind it. We check every service around the clock and publish the results, bad days included. For the past 30 days the figure was 99.93% across 1,478 checks.

This is a measured number, not a sales line, and it will drift up or down a little as events happen. Anyone, customer or not, can look at the current status, past history and any open incident on our status page.