A recent study published by NovaHoster has shed light on the evolution of the web hosting market in Tunisia over the past three decades. The study, which analyzed archives from TUNET and Hexabyte, reveals that in March 2004, TUNET offered Tunisian businesses a shared hosting plan of 20 megabytes for 200 dinars per year, and 50 megabytes for 250 dinars. These capacities seem laughable today, but they reflect a time when the Tunisian web was not yet a significant market.
Prior to 2009, the web hosting market in Tunisia was dominated by state-owned and private internet service providers. The Tunisian Internet Agency, established in 1996, managed the national infrastructure, domain name servers, and the .tn registry, and hosted public websites. For private businesses, web hosting was sold as an add-on to internet subscriptions. GlobalNet obtained the first private license in 1997, followed by Planet Tunisie in 1998, Hexabyte in 2001, and Topnet in the mid-2000s. However, few providers treated web hosting as a standalone business with a dedicated team and strategy.
According to Amine Dammak, founder of NovaHoster and director of the Novatis agency, early web hosting services were limited by their dependence on third-party infrastructure. "We delivered websites to our clients, but we were entirely dependent on a third party for what happened afterwards," he recalls. "The deadline for creating an email address or restoring a backup was not ours, while the client turned to us." However, archival data from Hexabyte in 2009 shows that some higher-tier plans included daily backups, SSL security, 99.9% uptime guarantees, and technical support.
One significant constraint that limited the growth of the Tunisian web hosting market was the lack of international credit cards. Businesses could not subscribe to foreign web hosting services because they did not have access to international payment methods. This, combined with limited local capacities, kept the market stagnant for over a decade. The situation changed in 2009 when Novatis launched its own infrastructure and started offering web hosting services.
NovaHoster, which was established in 2010, is considered the first independent Tunisian web hosting company that was not affiliated with an internet service provider. The company's founder, Amine Dammak, notes that the breakthrough in 2009 was not technical but contractual. Clients gained control over their email addresses, databases, and subdomains, and prices were aligned with the global market, billed in dinars.
The study divides the history of Tunisia's web hosting market into four generations: the public infrastructure from 1996 to 2000, the ISP era until 2008, the emergence of independent web hosts from 2009, and the cloud and automation era from 2016. A fifth generation is currently underway, driven by modern JavaScript architectures and artificial intelligence-powered creation tools. Despite progress, a recent study by NovaHoster found that 85% of Tunisian websites perform poorly on mobile devices.
The study, which analyzed 205 Tunisian websites, revealed that the median display time for websites was 6.7 seconds on mobile devices, compared to 1.2 seconds on computers. Furthermore, half of the websites tested were inaccessible when the address was entered without the "www" prefix. Amine Dammak notes that the median server response time was 89 milliseconds, indicating that the slow performance is primarily due to page content and scripts rather than infrastructure.
Key points
- The Tunisian web hosting market has evolved significantly over the past three decades, from limited capacities to modern services.
- The lack of international credit cards and limited local capacities constrained the growth of the market.
- Independent web hosting companies like NovaHoster have driven innovation and improvement in the market.
