In 2018, we moved away from Webafrica as Gridhost to start a new journey as a specialised web hosting business for SMEs in Southern Africa. After rebranding as 1-grid, the 10-year vision was to offer a trusted and reliable space for new and existing customers to build their online presence. With more people shifting to the online economy, and companies fast tracking their digital transformation, our move to 1-grid was perfectly positioned to fill the needs of entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses getting their offerings online.
Our dedicated focus on the web hosting space in Southern Africa has been built to offer refined product offerings for the customer looking for a one-stop solution in getting their business online.
“We made a bid to focus on the SME market in Southern Africa. Our aim was to build a world-class web hosting offering with dedicated attention to our customers. Now, more than ever, it’s important for SMEs to have an online platform, and since 2018 we have not only built a premium web hosting service, but a suite of online products”, Thomas Vollrath, 1-grid CEO.
We invested in knowledgeable team members, improved our internal and external processes and ultimately grew our suite of products to offer everything from high-performance enterprise servers and professional business email, to easy-to-use website builders and even VPN. Within one year we had reached more than 35,000 customers and a suite of online products.
With the popularity of mobile in Southern African we then set our sights on a customer app in 2020. A year later we launched with the aim of helping customers manage and maintain their websites anytime, anywhere. Customers can pay their subscription, publish, edit and monitor their websites on-the-go.
In 2021, our focus continues to revolve around the improvement and success of our customer support with a constant awareness of and adaptation to customer needs. The latest additions to our support system include new interactive channels — web chat and WhatsApp.
In addition we launched a brand new Knowledge Base to assist customers throughout their product introduction and experience, as well as refreshed our affiliate program to include non-customers. Following these upgrades, the older Windows Control Panels were replaced with the modern Plesk Obsidian, providing customers with an even simpler, easy-to-use website and server management tool from their desktop or mobile devices.
What we have in store for 2021
The next year will continue to see improvements in response to customer needs, including:
- Extending our Linux hosting control panels by offering Plesk Obsidian, in addition to cPanel
- Adding additional layers of security on our web hosting control panels
- Refreshing our virtual hosting infrastructure
