South Sudan: Shared Hosting and Online Business

During Site.pro’s visit to the Domain Summit Kenya, Filip Borcov met with Thai Jock, CEO and Founder of Jiinubi.com — a web hosting company from South Sudan. In the new Shared Hosting Tips video, they talked about the state of the South Sudanese digital market, local economy, languages and domains.

Site.pro in South Sudan

The Digital Economy of South Sudan

South Sudan is still a developing country, with its economy only starting to find its footing.

The country gained independence from Sudan only in 2011. Ongoing wars have been preventing South Sudan from fast economic growth, but there is a surge of business development among locals.

People started investing in online businesses — building websites, getting domains — leading to growing demand for hosting services.

Domains

The ccTLD of South Sudan is .ss — it had been officially allocated in 2011, but registration was only opened to the public in 2019. Currently, there are around 15,000 .ss domains registered. Most of them are registered with jiinubi.com. Domain penetration is still low, but people buy multiple domains for their businesses — .com, .online, or .shop.

The price for a .ss domain can go up to $20 — quite expensive, especially for South Sudan. Because of this, local businesses aim for global domains that cost them less.

Support

For support teams, the load is inconsistent. At the start of the business, customers want full guidance and a lot of attention to every single detail — the onboarding period is intense. After everything is set up, the demand for support becomes much lower.

Still, support workers are available 24/7. Customers send tickets in three languages — English, Amharic and Swahili.

Payment gateways

International payment gateways like PayPal and Visa and Mastercard are available and popular. Local solutions include Kenyan M-Pesa and mGURUSH — the official money transfer system of South Sudan.

Local Languages and Tribes

Jiinubi mainly operates in its home country, but also in Ethiopia and Kenya.

What’s interesting is that all three of these countries speak different languages despite being so close to each other.

The cultures of Jiinubi’s markets are also vastly different — there are lots of different tribes, economic systems and geopolitical dynamics between them.

South Sudan itself is very diverse. On the country’s territory, there are around 64 tribes, with each speaking its own language. English became the primary official language only after independence, so many people still struggle with it. Because of this, the Jiinubi's team is trying to at least partially localise their product for smaller languages, so everyone has access to hosting, domains and running an online business.

The Surge of Online Business

For a long time, South Sudanese businesspeople struggled to comfortably settle their companies. Even after independence, getting a business registered was very difficult because of weak institutions and non-existent digitalisation — many bureaucratic processes were manual. A prolonged civil war introduced even more obstacles for the young economy.

Until very recently, registering a business required physical presence at government offices, physical documents and multiple approvals across ministries.

The situation is changing. Companies are moving away from traditional offline models and increasingly opting to develop online. The population of South Sudan is about 12 million, and the number of officially registered businesses is around 55,000 — not too many, but the market is still in transition.

Lessons from Failures

Filip and Thai shared some failures their companies faced, and reflected on ways those mistakes can be avoided in the future.

Investment in the wrong audience

Jiinubi has a campaign dedicated to aiding new businesses — the team helped clients with onboarding and provided them with a free trial. But in the end, the businesses never managed to proceed any further and didn’t develop their websites.

Thai attributes the reason for this failure to reaching out to the wrong audience — one that isn’t actually interested in going online.

Weak local branding

Site.pro positions itself as an international company and operates worldwide. However, it didn’t build a strong brand in any particular country. The company has many clients in total, but they are dispersed across hundreds of countries — one client from Algeria, five from Tunisia, five from Egypt, and so on. This makes it hard to develop a significant presence in any given country.

It’s fine for the B2B sector — one of Site.pro’s strongest products is a white-label AI website builder, after all. But for B2C, this is not ideal. For end-users, a recognisable brand is very important. Weak branding leads to lower conversions and a lower number of queries in search engines.

To fix this, Site.pro plans to build a stronger presence and gradually establish itself for end-users as well.

Lifehacks

Lifehack #1: Bundling is key

Jiinubi launched a campaign where they bundled multiple products for online business — a free website builder, a free logo design, and cheap hosting — as a “Jiinubi online kit”. The idea was to make it easier for businesses to start. Many people were excited about this opportunity. The campaign was successful — many bundle kits were sold.

People like being able to solve a big, complicated problem with a single solution — that’s why bundling works so well.

Lifehack #2: Joining two websites into one

When a company has to run multiple websites, that’s at least two times more resources spent on maintenance and management. Websites also usually don’t carry the same weight for Google — this means double the effort for SEO development. For a small company, that’s almost a dead end. Not to mention how expensive it is to pay for every localised domain in every country you operate in.

To solve this issue, Site.pro decided to merge its two brands (B1.lt and Site.pro) and websites into one.

Website Builders in South Sudan

South Sudanese businesses find website builders useful, especially emerging AI website builders. With a lot of errands to run and issues to think about, it’s helpful to have a tool that makes it possible to create a website quickly. This allows people to focus on their ideas rather than learning the technical aspects of web design.

Cloud vs On‑premises

In South Sudan, on‑premises solutions remain more preferable than cloud services because of local regulatory compliance and limited regulatory clarity. Jiinubi follows the rules and ensures compliance with the regulations of the countries it operates in — in Kenya, for example, there are strict rules regarding data transfer and protection.

On‑premises hosting limits the international transfer of users’ data. Local clients feel more confident and comfortable knowing their personal information is stored securely on local servers.

Welcome to South Sudan!

Despite South Sudan’s digital market is being so young, it holds immense potential for growth. Domains, hosting, and website builders are becoming essential building blocks of this transition with the help of hosting providers like Jiinubi. Let's wait and see South Sudan become the new Switzerland!