Current State of the Web Hosting Industry Globally and in Zimbabwe
Web hosting, I don't think I need to explain what it is, but for the sake of clarity, web hosting is a service that allows websites to be accessible on the internet. In this article I am going to get into more detail about the current state of the web hosting industry globally and in Zimbabwe.
I didn't write this article to bore you with useless information about what is the best web hosting provider. My bill on Vercel is beyond my comprehension but I pay for it anyways because I love the developer experience. Ultimately the best web hosting provider for you depends on your project and budget.
Global State
Let's start by discussing the global state of the web hosting industry. The biggest names in the industry being providers like Vercel and Netlify. We all know the dynamic with Vercel,they bring your project to life then when it starts scaling your bill becomes a midrange car every month forcing you to make the shift to platforms like Cloudflare.
Not that you have to shift, you can always optimize your project on Vercel 🙂 I'm not here to upvote or downvote any platform.
Okay I lied maybe those are just the biggest names for react hosting but overall the market share tilts more to Godaddy, AWS and Google Cloud.
Outside of all the noise I think one of the key discussions in 2026 about the global state of the web hosting industry is going VPS (Railway, Digital Ocean etc.) or Serverless (Vercel, AWS etc.). These are the 2 popular kids in town and both have their own cons and pros.
My verdict on the topic is if you have the technical capability and a less complex project then sure host your website on a dedicated VPS otherwise my friend open that wallet and give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
Local (Zimbabwe) State
In Zimbabwe we have providers like Webdev, WebZim and EcoWeb. I cannot vouch for or criticize any of them but I have heard of the cPanel headaches and downtime issues.
The industry nationally has a long way to go but I'm a believer 🤞. We as the Zim Developers Labs are working on a DX optimized web hosting platform "xfinitypros.com" built on top of AWS with additional servers in Zimbabwe for optimal local online experience.
You can join our whatsapp group using the link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FfXS39iLv7k36jrskKjOfX
Food for thought
- There are over 1 billion websites on the internet, but only about 17% (approx. 200 million) are active
- Web hosting can cost over US$100,000 per month with traffic in the millions and a lot of premium features
- An average data center uses about 1.8 billion liters of water per year for cooling (i.e A simple conversation with an AI chatbot can consume about a "water bottle" worth of water in cooling costs.)