Zimbabwe: Looking at the Growing Market with Jacob Kudzayi Mutisi, CEO, Hansole Investments

Hansole Investments is a domain and shared hosting provider in Zimbabwe, a country located in Southeast Africa. Being in business for more than 12 years, the company is one of the top registrars in the country, leading the way for Zimbabwe’s digitisation.

We invited Jacob Kudzayi Mutisi, the CEO of the company, for a chat, with the aim of understanding Zimbabwe, its shared hosting market, and the digital world better. Jacob talked about the country, the digital market, the challenges they’ve been facing, as well as the goals for the company.

Zimbabwe and Shared Hosting

Zimbabwe Market in Size

Zimbabwe has a population of around 16 million people. Hansole Investments manages around 10,000 domains, being one of the top registrars in the country. Despite the large size of the population, the challenge is that the majority of businesses don’t have registered domains, as well as they don’t have websites. Jacob and his team aim to make it mandatory for every company registered in Zimbabwe to have a registered domain, and a website. 'This will be a big push for the country. We want to make big changes for Zimbabwe, and we are looking forward to this because what we want is to make it easy for people to register their domains. We’ve got at least about 4.5 to 5 million involved outside the country and the majority of them want to run the business in Zimbabwe, and it would be great to make it easier for them to register a domain in the country.'

Pricing and Payment Methods

While purchasing insurance, people pay attention to quality greatly, but they are also concerned about the pricing. Because Zimbabwe is yet a developing country that often faces economic issues, people are forced to consider all aspects of the purchase. 'Of course, people would prefer to purchase a quality service at the cheapest price possible, but if the quality is significantly better at the upper end of the market, they’ll pay as well. I’d say that quality is what matters the most to them.' The average price of hosting is around $4-5/month.

As the requirements of the companies grow, and they need more space to host their data, the price will grow accordingly, coming to around $120/year. Then there is the domain price, which can be $5-10, but some companies, including Hansole Investments, provide it for free, as part of the package. 'I think the problem is that the ordinary person doesn’t know where to register a domain. We need to make this information public, and in that case, I think Zimbabwe has the potential to become a hosting market with big growth,' says Jacob.

When it comes to payment methods, Zimbabwe has a few rules and regulations to comply with. Currently, the biggest payment gateway is called Pay Now, but it’s expected that there’ll be a lot more options in the future. PayPal is available in the country as well, but according to the monetary policy of the country, one needs to be on the ground to use a payment platform. That is, to receive some kind of payment legally, you need to have a presence in the country.

Languages and Communication

English is the official language of Zimbabwe, and a lot of what is done in the country is done in English. However, there are other major languages in the country, such as Shona and Ndebele. In total, there are 11 languages spoken in the country. The company tries to make sure that their services are available on Ndebele and Shona as well, notwithstanding the accessibility of English, and their support services are available in all three languages.

Website Builders and Data Hosting in Zimbabwe

The popularity of website builders is still only starting in Zimbabwe, as people are only starting to grasp the importance of online presence for their businesses. 'We have Site.pro and we have other website builders, but it’s not an area that many people are playing in, because the majority expect a developer to build their sites for them instead of actually doing it themselves. In the future, we hope to push the website builder technology, because we don’t want people to knock on someone’s door when they need a website. Rather, we want them to make it themselves.'

People use local data centers to host their websites, but they also use outside servers for backup. The reason for this is that the country sometimes struggles in terms of the provision of electricity, and if local servers went out without a backup, it’d harm the business significantly. 'We need to look at ways of actually protecting the customer, so that if your local server goes down then you've got a server somewhere else where you know that power is always available and your server is up at all times.'

Wrapping Up

'We are a very small country and there are not enough specialists, but we now just hire the best professionals. Hopefully, with this team we will transform the way that people exist online,' sums up Jacob. As the company is working towards making going online accessible for everyone, Zimbabwe gets a chance to speed up the process of digitisation, and we can’t wait to see what the results will be.