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Pan-African hosting provider HOSTAFRICA has acquired Zanode, a South African application hosting platform. The acquisition will help HOSTAFRICA expand its offering beyond traditional web hosting into developer-first infrastructure built for the AI era.
According to HOSTAFRICA, the deal extends the company’s product suite into GitHub-based deployments, managed PostgreSQL, and ZAR-denominated pricing, capabilities squarely targeted at agencies, software development companies, and SaaS teams serving the South African market.
The acquisition comes just days after the company acquired the hosting division of ECOWEB.
HOSTAFRICA is a pan-African digital infrastructure and hosting provider that supports more than 100,000 customers through local teams, locally relevant support, and infrastructure designed for African users. With the Zanode acquisition, the company is pivoting towards developer-first services and positioning itself as the infrastructure partner of choice for Africa’s growing class of software builders navigating an increasingly AI-accelerated development landscape.
Zanode was built to address a persistent gap in the local developer ecosystem. South African agencies and development shops have long been pushed toward offshore platforms that offer neither South African invoicing nor local infrastructure.
Zanode changes that by letting customers connect a GitHub repository and access an automated deployment workflow, covering framework auto-detection, Dockerfile-based deploys, managed Postgres, custom domains, and automatic SSL, all running on local infrastructure with pricing in rands.
The acquisition also aligns with the continent’s accelerating pace of AI-assisted software development. In its statement, HOSTAFRICA noted that rapid iteration, frequent commits, and reliable Git-to-production pipelines are fast becoming non-negotiable for product teams.
Zanode, it said, was purpose-built as a backbone for these automated deployment cycles, giving local developers the infrastructure to keep pace with AI-driven build speeds and turn that pace into a competitive edge.
“This acquisition is about extending what hosting means at HOSTAFRICA,” said Michael Osterloh, CEO of HOSTAFRICA. “Zanode adds a modern, git-driven deployment experience on top of that foundation, which is exactly what agencies and software development companies in South Africa have been asking for. They want to push from GitHub, not drag files through cPanel, and they want their apps and their users on the same continent. With AI accelerating how quickly software gets built, that local, git-driven foundation matters more than ever.”
HOSTAFRICA describes the Zanode platform as particularly well-suited to digital agencies managing client work, software development companies shipping internal tools and SaaS products, and independent developers who need predictable ZAR pricing and low local latency.
