Why I Built a Domain Registrar in South Africa
In 2019 I built my first website.
I was studying digital media design at the time — focused on visuals, storytelling, helping brands communicate online. The plan was to get good at the surface layer. The stuff people see.
But I started working with local businesses, and I quickly realized the surface layer wasn’t their problem.
Their problem was getting online at all.
The Actual Barrier
Most of the businesses I worked with didn’t understand how domains worked. Hosting felt confusing. Setting up a basic website meant navigating a collection of fragmented services that each assumed you already knew what you were doing.
So I started helping them solve it, one by one.
What began as small projects gradually pulled me deeper into the technical side of the web. Domains, DNS, hosting infrastructure, the systems that power the internet behind the scenes. The further in I got, the more I noticed the same pattern everywhere: registering and managing a domain should be simple, fast, and transparent. For most people — especially in South Africa — it still wasn’t.
Not because the technology was hard. Because nobody had bothered to make the experience match the simplicity the technology was capable of.
That’s what Jetdomains is built to fix.
What I kept running into as a developer
By the time I started building Jetdomains, I’d registered enough domains — for clients, for side projects, for things I was testing — to have a clear picture of what was wrong.
The registrars serving South Africa were either internationals where .co.za was an afterthought buried in a dropdown, or local providers that hadn’t been updated in a decade, with checkout flows that made you second-guess whether your card had actually gone through.
The part I’m still thinking through
Here’s where I’ll be honest about where my head is right now — because I think it matters for understanding what Jetdomains is actually trying to be.
I still build on other people’s infrastructure. Most developers do. Vercel for deployment, AWS for compute, Stripe for payments, Cloudflare for DNS. These are good tools. I use them. Jetdomains runs on some of them.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about what that dependency structure means going forward — especially as AI starts to reshape how software gets built and deployed. The infrastructure decisions that felt stable a couple of years ago feel less settled now. Models need to run somewhere. Agents need to own resources. The relationship between a domain, a host, and an application is going to get more complex, not less.
What I believe — and what I’m building toward — is that infrastructure needs to be decoupled and flexible. Not locked into any single provider’s assumptions about how the web works. A domain should be a portable, owner-controlled anchor point. Everything else should be configurable around it.
Jetdomains starts with registration because that’s the foundation. But the direction is toward giving founders and developers real control over the infrastructure layer — without needing to become infrastructure engineers to do it.
Where it is now
Jetdomains is live at jetdomains.co.za.
You can search for a domain, check .co.za availability in real time, and register it. Pricing is upfront. The checkout works. DNS management is in the dashboard.
The DNS wizard — which will walk you through pointing your domain to wherever your stack lives — is still being built. There’s also a lot more on the roadmap.
But the core is working. And this site, issamzk.com, is registered on Jetdomains. If something breaks, I’m the first to know.
If you’re building something and need a domain in South Africa, try Jetdomains.
You can check .co.za domain availability in real time, register instantly, and manage DNS without the usual friction.
And if something feels broken, tell me. That feedback is what shapes the product.