South African ISP Axxess has acquired Absolute Hosting, a Johannesburg-based web hosting company focused on SMEs. Financial terms were not disclosed. Absolute Hosting continues operating as an independent business under its own brand, with founder Jade Benson remaining managing director and the existing team running day-to-day operations. Existing customers see no changes to contracts, pricing, support, or service levels.
Axxess CEO Andrew Simpson was direct about the rationale: “Part of our strategy for 2026 was to make an acquisition in the hosting industry, to bulk up our hosting revenues and our footprint in South Africa.” Simpson cited Absolute Hosting’s team, cultural alignment, and the mutual learning opportunity as factors in the deal.
A Return to Roots for Axxess
The acquisition has a certain circularity to it. Axxess was founded in 1997 by Franco Barbalich in Gqeberha as a web hosting and design business under the name Axxess Africa. The company later expanded into hardware and business connectivity before growing into one of South Africa’s largest independently owned ISPs, winning ISP of the Year five times on MyBroadband. Today Axxess operates as a subsidiary of Afrihost (Pty) Ltd, offering fibre, LTE, 5G, VoIP, and web hosting across all nine South African provinces with more than 200 employees.
Hosting has always been part of the Axxess portfolio but not its primary identity. The Absolute Hosting acquisition is a signal that the company is moving to change that balance. Buying a specialist operator rather than building internally suggests Axxess is prioritizing speed to credibility in the hosting segment over organic growth.
What Absolute Hosting Brings
Absolute Hosting was founded in 2018 by Jade Benson and has established a technically differentiated position in the South African hosting market in a short time. The company claims South Africa’s largest selection of AMD EPYC VPS servers and has been an early adopter of successive AMD generations: it announced the country’s first NVMe cPanel hosting powered by AMD EPYC Genoa processors in February 2024, and its current infrastructure includes AMD EPYC Turin processors, PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage, DDR5 ECC RAM, and liquid-cooled Ryzen 9 9900X servers for intensive workloads. Services are hosted from Digital Parks Africa’s tier 3 data centre.
Absolute Hosting also completed its own acquisition in October 2024, buying ZA Domains, an 11-year-old .za domain registrar accredited by ZARC, the South African domain regulator. That deal gave Absolute Hosting its own domain registration infrastructure and reduced customer registration costs. The company also offers two high-performance WordPress hosting packages alongside cPanel Linux hosting, Windows hosting, and reseller solutions.
Benson framed the deal as a capacity expansion rather than a change of direction: “Our focus at Absolute Hosting has always been about bringing the best hosting technology to South African businesses, and this partnership gives us the resources to do that at a greater scale. We’re still the same team offering the best technology, supported by the same dynamics and commitment.”
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Context for the South African Market
The South African hosting market is dominated by a small number of established players but has seen consistent activity from technically ambitious smaller operators. Absolute Hosting’s trajectory, founding in 2018, AMD EPYC Genoa in 2024, EPYC Turin and PCIe 5.0 shortly after, ZA Domains acquisition, Axxess deal, shows a founder pushing aggressively on infrastructure differentiation as the path to growth in a crowded market.
For Axxess, the deal adds a specialist hosting brand with a distinct technical identity and a customer base of SMEs that complements its existing ISP customer relationships. The independent operating model limits integration risk: Absolute Hosting’s customers get the backing of a larger group without the disruption of a platform migration or rebrand, and Axxess gets hosting revenue growth without having to build the technical credibility from scratch.
Łukasz Nowak
Nearly two decades in IT. A decade in web hosting - and still in the trenches. Writing about the infrastructure that runs the internet from the inside.