Garanntor, a web hosting company established in the last quarter of 2016 by Olalekan Ajayi aims to meet the need for local hosting service providers and become one of the first African web hosting companies offering high quality service just like international hosting companies.
With one goal, Garanntor a newly registered Kenyan firm, aims to move the over 90% of local content hosted on servers outside of Africa.
“I absolutely believe Africa is the next big market,” founder and CEO Olalekan Ajayi told TechMoran. “It’s an untapped market with over 400 million internet users with very few of those internet users hosting their services with African hosting companies.”
“As a matter of fact, over 90% of the applications and platforms are hosted outside Africa. To us, this is a challenge. If African Hosting companies can rise up and offer the same kind of high quality service offered by the best international hosting companies, we will definitely be able to own a good share of the African market,” he added.
With plans to roll out new products as time goes such as Container Servers, Garanntor’s plan for the Kenyan market is simply to offer the best hosting service to its customers. At the moment, Garanntor deals in virtual and cloud servers, domain name transfer and registration, web hosting, website builder, SSL Certificates, SiteLock and Cloud Storage as well as content CDN and both website and server backup. Garantor also offers Anycast DNS, Colocation, Load Balancing and a variety of email services.
To Ajayi local hosting will increase both latency speed and data sovereignty compared to firms hosting their data on a server in either the US or somewhere in Europe like the case of Kenya’s IEBC.
The international Hosting and Infrastructure-as-a Service company has a presence In Kenya to serve East Africa and Nigeria to serve West Africa. Garanntor is promising an international standard service to its customers across the country and is pretty sure Kenyan businesses that host and partner with it will save time and money and have a reliable service and support around the clock.
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The firm has not revealed how much it as put into its Kenyan operation but it says it has invested Millions of Kenyan Shillings on infrastructure and local set up and in OPEX.
“Kenya is the most developed technological market in the region and has the highest internet penetration rate by some credible standards,” Ajayi said. “As the Kenyan market is strategic for East Africa, so also is the Nigerian Market for West Africa. We are not abandoning the Nigerian market. We serve business and organizations all over Nigeria and are still expanding our operations and launching new products and services across the country.”
Though margins on Domain and web hosting are small, the service cannot be overlooked. Garanntor adds that domain sales and web hosting is just a fraction of its business but it;s holy grail is the increasing number of enterprise clients who use its cloud server, infrastructure services and colocation services to power their businesses.
Unlike resellers, Garanntor owns and manages its own infrastructure in various data centers and is on a long-term journey to achieve its goal of being the largest player in Africa.
Although its not ISO/27001 certified yet, Garanntor says it follows the standards within its organization as it understands the volatile nature of its business especially during staff transition. To ensure that customer and company information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, the firm has automated the entire customer journey to ensure no human beings interact with an organization’s data.
Garanntor’s services are not restricted to channels or platforms. Users can run its hosting on different platforms inclusive of mobile first platforms. It’s pricing is also almost free and clients are guaranteed a secured environment as well as highly skilled support staff.
The firm is not currently seeking investment or partners to help in its pan-African expansion drive as it’s generating enough revenue for sustenance and expansion. However, it’s open to strategic partnerships with businesses in markets it enters to make running businesses better for its customers.
Garanntor has no exit strategy and is expanding to reach more customers in Kenya with its services for individuals, SMEs and enterprises. Some of the firms that it will take on include WhoGoHost in Nigeria and Safaricom Cloud, Sasahost, Truehost in Kenya among others for individuals and East African Data Center for SMEs and enterprise customers.
