Our story
From Cozahost to cozan.
The short version of how a hosting company started at a kitchen table became the IT partner for hundreds of South African businesses.
1999
A hosting company at the kitchen table
Waldo and Janice Louw started Cozahost from their home in Cape Town. The plan was simple: a web hosting company whose income would pay for a dedicated internet line, at a time when most homes still dialled up. Waldo and his son Wadda had a second reason for wanting that line. Quake 2, and the low latency it takes to win at it. There was no office then, and there has never been one since.
Cozahost was started so two people could play online without lag. The clients came along for the ride, and then they stayed.
From day one
The whistle
When somebody registered a domain on the Cozahost website, a notification arrived and Waldo or Janice blew a whistle in the house. Every new client was celebrated out loud, by the whole family. It set a tone the business never lost: a client is not a line on a spreadsheet. It's somebody who decided to trust you.
We still whistle for every new client. We're just a bit quieter about it now.
The first logo
A horseman from an art book
Nobody hired a designer. Janice scanned a marble sculpture of a man on a horse out of a Leonardo da Vinci art book, and that was the Cozahost logo. Looking back, it said a lot about who we are: a bit old-school, a bit ambitious, and happy to make do with whatever is to hand.
The logo has changed a few times since. The habit of making do, properly, hasn't.
The early years
Explaining why a domain name matters
In 1999 you had to persuade a business owner that their own .co.za was worth having. That an email address ending in their own company name looked more serious than a free one. That a website could be more than a brochure. We had those conversations one at a time, in plain language, until they made sense. It's still the part of the job we like most.
Twenty-seven years later we're having the same conversation, about AI. It's further down this page.
2002
A second generation
Wadda joined the family business straight after matric, on support and server work. Cozahost grew from hosting and domains into ADSL, consulting and bespoke software for businesses that needed something off-the-shelf products couldn't do.
2014
Selling the hosting to focus on the cloud
Web Africa bought our web hosting and ADSL data business. It was a deliberate choice, not a retreat. Cloud email and collaboration were clearly where small businesses were heading, and we would rather be very good at that than run a data centre. Web Africa took over the servers. We kept the consulting, the development and, most of all, the relationships: businesses whose domains, websites and email we had looked after for years, and who wanted the same people to carry on doing it.
2014 onwards
Google Apps, G Suite, Google Workspace
We were already selling and supporting Google Apps, and now it became the centre of the business. We lived through the rename to G Suite, then to Google Workspace, and through every pricing change and feature launch in between. Along the way we moved a couple of hundred businesses onto it without a single one losing email in the move, and we still look after them today.
2019 to 2020
Slightly ahead of the storm
After twenty years of working from home, we knew a business didn't need a building to function. In 2019 and early 2020 we ran a campaign to help South African businesses move to a distributed workforce: cloud email, shared files, video meetings and the security to go with them. Then COVID arrived. The businesses that had already made the move kept working while others scrambled, and we spent that year helping as many as we could catch up. We're grateful we were a little ahead of the curve. It let us help a lot of businesses weather the storm.
Working without an office wasn't a pandemic decision for us. It was how the business had always worked.
Today
cozan
Cozahost became Cozan Consulting, and then simply cozan. We're a Google Cloud partner and reseller, a Cloudflare partner and an ESET partner, still family-run, still internet native, still in Cape Town, and still explaining things until they make sense. We still build software when off-the-shelf won't do, and these days we help businesses work out what to hand to AI and what to keep human. The whistle, the Quake 2 line and the kitchen table are why we do it the way we do. And the kitchen table is still in use: the family sits down around it every Sunday, work or no work.
