Web Africa, please be more competitive in regards with bandwidth

[James]

Please be more competitive with your hosting packages in terms with bandwidth on local packages. I just received an email from Web Online were they are increasing the bandwidth substantially.

Their "econo" package for R50 boasts 1 GB of traffic compared with your 100Mb offered on your R39.00 package and a whooping 200Mb with your R79.99 package.Webonline offer 2Gb on their R100 package next to your 400Mb on the R136.80 package.

You are/were working through Hetzner and even they surpass all your bandwidth quotas. Your pricing per MB for standard hosting options is the highest I have found and on a par with the way over priced MWEB who are not even a "specialist" hosting companies. We all know that bandwidth is costly but all we ask for is a bit of competitiveness or even just more inline with local standards.

[Franna]

I agree 100%.

Maybe the bandwidth allowance can be split between international bandwidth and local bandwidth. Most of the traffic for a locally hosted website will be local, with some bandwidth for international users and SE spiders. And wholesale local bandwidth is less expensive than international bandwidth.

This will bring users closer to the hosting servers, and thus save the precious (overpriced) SAT/SAFE bandwidth.

According to me the current WA packages give bandwidth allowances as if ALL the traffic will be international destined, where actually most of the traffic will be local.

I hope the SNO will provide a cheaper local-only backbone for ISPs and hosting companies, not help feed the Telkom SAT/SAFE cash cow. With some clever routing this should not be that hard to implement. The difficult part would be to add a custom module to the Helm control panel to monitor the seperate local and international bandwidth.

[James]

Thanks for the feedback James, much appreciated. I too feel its time for a review on our hosting packages.

I'll make a point to mention this with the other directors at our next meeting and we'll see what we can do.

A response from Web Africa