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Website hosting: Local or international?
| Rudolph Muller | May 18, 2009 | No comments |
Rudolph Muller
Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...
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Choosing the right hosting provider for a website is a key part of online success.
Hosting a website within the borders of South Africa has always been an expensive operation, particularly when the website was anything more than brochure-ware and likely to attract a lot of visitors every day. The only option to date has been to host websites with high traffic volumes offshore with one of the many providers based in the US and Europe. Doing so cuts bandwidth costs significantly but also has some potential pitfalls. We look at some of the options.
What type of site?
Most users setting up a website for the first time imagine huge amounts of visitors and hundreds of thousands of pageviews every day. The reality is that unless they are starting a news portal, a social networking site or forum-based website with potentially thousands of community members, the website is very likely to have just a few hundred visitors a month, each looking at a handful of pages each month. This is particularly true of a website that is used to advertise a small or medium business with primarily contact details and a few customer references on it. Unlike large news sites or community-driven and interactive sites which have users returning to the site more than one a day, most websites will have few returning visitors each month.
A site that is expected to generate just a few hundred visitors a month, each viewing three or four pages, will probably need to cater for a maximum of 1 000 pageviews a month to allow for growth and small spikes in traffic. Which could realistically translate into around 300 – 500MB of bandwidth used a month assuming the pages don’t include multimedia or heavy graphics. Of course the webpages could be stripped down even further but to be safe it’s worth overestimating the bandwidth needs.
Unless the website is expected to serve up significantly less than 1 000-plus pages month it’s best to plan for this type of bandwidth allocation and shop around.
Hetzner, for example, offers a Micro Pro hosting package which is charged at R39 a month and offers 500MB of local bandwidth. Exceeding that traffic during a month will add an additional 19c per MB to your account. The package, however, does not include a relational database or PHP access, so the sites run off the package are mostly limited to static HTML sites with occasional Javascript for limited interactivity. To build a database-driven website, Hetzner’s Basic package at R99 a month includes one database and offers a 1.5GB bandwidth limit as well as PHP scripting.
In comparison Internet’s Solutions’ Linux Lite shared hosting solution is charged at R70 a month and a very minimal 50MB a month in bandwidth allocation. Like many entry-level packages the hosting doesn’t include a relational database, limiting how dynamic the websites hosted on the package can be. A better IS choice for most serious first-time users would be the company’s Profile package which includes three MySQL databases and 500MB bandwidth a month. IS charges 16c per additional bandwidth megabyte used and the Profile package costs R110 a month.
Packing in the visors
The real challenge comes when you’re planning a dynamic community or news site which is expected to draw in thousands of visitors a day, many of them potentially visiting more than once a day. In this case bandwidth bills are going to mount quickly and eventually, unless the site is generating significant income, the cost of running the site could quickly overwhelm the incoming money.
A Hetzner Master shared-hosting package costs R439 a month and includes 5GB of local bandwidth and up to 40 databases. Which is affordable for a growing website but any site with more than a couple of thousand regular visitors, even if they’re not downloading video, could exceed this very quickly. And then, at 19c per MB after the allocated bandwidth, the account starts climbing quickly.
The alternative for sites of this size is to switch to a dedicated hosting setup, which can be costly, or move the site offshore. Moving a website to an offshore hosting provider can slash the costs of bandwidth significantly. US hosting provider MediaTemple, for example, offers its Grid Service solution for $20 a month (around R200 a month) which includes up to 1 terrabyte of bandwidth of bandwidth per month, MySQL databases and the option to host up to 100 domains under the same account. Other providers such as HostGator offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage for even less on mostly a per-domain basis. HostGator’s Hatchling package offers users a single domain with no bandwidth limits for less than $9 a month (R90).
Hosting offshore offers a significant cost saving for users but also comes with some pitfalls. One of these is that for sites wholly focused on the South African market performance may often not match local equivalents. If the site is relatively static and speed is not a critical factor then offshore hosting is a definite option, but for a site that is largely forum-drive or requires speed this could become a significant obstacle.
The other consideration is that sites focused on the South African market will largely want to maximise the experience for SA visitors. With many local users opting for local-only ADSL packages to contain costs a site hosted internationally will be inaccessible to them. And even if they don’t have a local-only account bandwidth caps may mean that at the end of the month, when they normal cap is exceeded, they will not be able to view the site. This is an important consideration for sites looking for constant readership throughout the month.
The other consideration is that, depending on the hosting provider, services levels may vary depending on their location. A South Africa-based hosting provider can be contacted during workhours using a telephone. A US-based provider may be less accessible by phone and contact may largely be limited to email and call centres.
Choosing a local or international hosting provider depends on the type of website being run, the target audience and the growth expectations and is worth serious consideration before launching the product.
Website hosting – who would you suggest?
