Webmail moves overseas

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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South Africa’s largest free email service, Webmail.co.za, has recently moved the hosting of their servers internationally.  According to Netcraft the move took place around November 2009, and the new hosting location for Webmail is Nfrance Datacenter in Paris, France.

While the reasons behind this decision are not clear, it may be related to the high bandwidth costs associated with hosting services in South Africa.  In South Africa data costs of between 5c and 10c per MB for high end hosting services are commonplace – multiple times higher than international hosting services.

Some users not happy

Some Webmail subscribers are not particularly happy with the move from Webmail, partly because the service is no longer accessible using ‘local only’ ADSL accounts.  “I find it disturbing that a local email provider webmail.co.za is now using overseas mail servers.  I found this out when my Telkom cap ran out & was using local only bandwidth and could not download any mail,” said one Webmail user.

One of Webmail’s biggest value propositions to local Internet users was the fact that it was hosted locally, and without this advantage some users may move to well known international services like Gmail or Hotmail.  The move may have already had an impact on Webmail’s traffic. 

In September 2009 Webmail served 33.5-million pages to 828,000 unique visitors, and was the fifth largest website registered with the Online Publishers Association.  In November Webmail dropped to number 11 on the list, and served around 29.4-million pages to 732,000 unique monthly visitors.

Webmail was contacted to ascertain when and why the hosting of the service was moved offshore, but Interface – the Webmail holding company – could not be reached for comment over the festive season.

Webmail hosting overseas – comments and views