I’ve been hosting in America for more then two years now and will likely never, ever host in South Africa. A new article on ITWeb discussed the conundrum of hosting in South Africa here. There are many people in the Internet industry that advocate hosting in South Africa for some kind of patriotic or proudly SA reasons. I don’t subscribe to any of them because it is more important to focus on the value added services, then on a commodity item like hosting. If you insist on hosting locally avoid M-Web and the likes and checkout this list for the cheapest hosting available from Hellkom.
Funny how that article has vanished from ITweb.
Telkom is one of ITWeb’s major advertisers.
Coincidence?
I disagree when saying hosting locally is a waste of time. Think of your users who are already paying an arm and a leg for bandwidth & the fact that visitng your site uses precious interantional bandwidth. Also when Telkom have problems with international bandwidth, like the break in Asia recently, not only will your US hosted site be unreachable but if your website is responsible for generating revenue from south african traffic the revenue will be lost.
Rafiq those points are valid to a very limited extent. As you know the TCP/IP protocol was designed to be redundant so its very, very unlikely that all the international connections will go down at the same time.
Also think about it from the users perspective. We/they do not care where the website is physically hosted. As long as its accessible at a reasonably fast speed that is the numero uno criteria for likely visiting the same website again.