Ask Afrihost CEO Gian Visser anything

[Afrihost-Gian]

Morning Gian .... thanks for your time! What's the most important thing you're working on right now, and how are you making it happen?

Cheers
Ryan

Hey Ryan! Tis my pleasure! Has been more work than I anticipated to be honest! The most important, specific thing I'm working on right now is to ensure that we turn around the year we had last year by making sure we give our clients the pure internet joy we promise with every product that we deliver. There are a million moving parts to get this done properly. Happier team. New network. Mobile products. Improved support. Refined client facing software. Satisfied MyBB forumites ;-) But we will not rest until it is all done.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

What do you think is a "good enough" average for the majority of your customers? (in terms of download speed and data consumption/utilization)

I think the answer to that is completely client dependant. We have clients that use less than 1GB a month and would faint if we made them use 5GB. We also have clients who have 40Mbps VDSL and chew through multiple Terabytes of data and still want more! So don't think there is one general answer for that.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

FTTH is getting rolled our everywhere (Most Places) do you have plans to get with DFA that has a much better infrastructure then Telkom ? THis way more people can take up your FTTH Services.

We’ll work with any and all providers that can bring value to our clients. We’re in talks with most of the top names in fibre and we plan to roll out Afrihost Data options with many of them throughout this year.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Your hosting ability is woeful, your team couldn't get my site to last a single day on your setup...

With my experience being repeated by many people, as seen on twitter, why aren't you just closing the hosting department?

Side note: Does it upset you that Mweb is branding this page with their options?

I'm sincerely sorry that this was the case for you Gavin. There's no doubt that we've dropped many balls over the years. I wish that this wasn't the case. But it is. There's no question that we've disappointed some of our clients over the years. Does this mean we will close our hosting department and stop offering hosting? No. The good news for us is that we have many, many clients we've managed to keep happy and have been with us for many years. So we will keep it open and continue to strive to improve every facet of our hosting service and drop less and less balls. Sorry again that we let you down.

Side note answer: Nope, not at all ;-)

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

I want to find out something about your Windows hosting packages. Why is that you use cPanel, a php hosting panel, instead of Plesk?

It makes it very difficult to manage websites, especially if you have a database driven website

We used Plesk on our Windows hosting packages many years ago. I believe we then chose to standardise to CPanel across all of our servers. Sorry to hear that this is not working for you for your MS database driven website. I'll have a look into that.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Will you be a 1 stop shop for FTTH (Line + Data), VOIP, Mobile, Mobile Data and everything an customer needs (at Great Prices) to pay 1 bill instead of paying 6 different providers for services ?

It is our aim to add more and more of what our clients need. So ultimately it would be fantastic to offer all the services you mention to all of our clients. But we will only add products if we truly believe they are great quality, great value and make our clients' lives easier and better. And that takes time to get right!

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Why are we still on 4Mbit fixed line broadband? Why do we still have exchange lag? What business models do overseas fiber companies have that we do not? Cheap labor? Job shortage? Anybody with some capital and a calculator should be digging trenches. Why is this not happening? Why?

I think it requires an incredible amount of money to lay out new infrastructure. There is also all the logistical considerations to take into account to be able to do it all successfully. Add to this the legal permissions required from government departments, municipalities and resident’s associations, etc and I don't believe that it is super simple unfortunately. Regardless of all these factors I think that, if you look at the last year, there has been an exponential leap forward in the fibre space. I believe that there will be even more movement in 2016 and within the next few years the Fibre dreams of many will become reality.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

In many countries it's not uncommon to see real true UNLIMITED broadband at a reasonable price, often less than our highly throttled and monitored "uncapped" packages. How long will South Africans have to wait before we get our hands on services like that?

Arthur Goldstuck wrote a great piece here (http://www.fin24.com/Tech/Opinion/why-data-caps-make-little-sense-in-sa-20160308) about how he sees the broadband landscape changing. I think it’s a mistake to assume that ISP’s are opposed to this. We all want to offer more data, cheaper, and a simple one click solution is a great thing for our clients. It all comes down to rands and cents though, and we have to implement business rules right now to make Uncapped viable. The cost of IPC is still high, and until we can bring the overall upstream costs down, we don’t see shaping and throttling as being outdated (in the South African context). I think Arthur’s point also rests on fibre penetration in the market rivalling ADSL and mobile, which is still a good few years away.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Will you be looking into rolling over mobile data on the same principal as you do you capped dsl packages and similar to Axxess does?

Ultimately we would love to provide rollover mobile data, and we do provide this when you top-up your mobile data with us. However, there are some other (mainly financial) factors that we have to take into account before we can do this. So the answer is, yes, we are looking into rolling it over as we do with our capped ADSL packages.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

What is your favourite cold beverage?

Definitely a cold beer on a hot day. Probably Castle Lite as this seems to appease my inner 'Thin Gian' from worrying about all the carbs a bit ;-)

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Well, I'm near the bottom of Page 4 of about 27 pages of questions! Got a tad more questions than I was expecting and it has taken me a weeeee bit longer than I thought it would to answer them all!

I need to go now to one of my kiddos parents' evening (no doubt to hear what a little legend he is, and how he has an unnaturally huge smile like his Dad) so I need to stop answering questions for now. I then have the bath and bedtime run with the kiddos. But I promise I will get back onto all the questions later. I will conquer!

RPM/ Mods could I ask you to please close this thread for now and then PM me to let me know who I can PM to open it for me later?

Thanks for your patience!

Gian, Out. For now.

 

[rpm]

Just PM me or MickeyD to open again Gian.

 

[MickeyD]

Mod note: Thread re-opened for Gian's replies. Please do NOT post more questions or follow-up comments yet.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Mod note: Thread re-opened for Gian's replies. Please do NOT post more questions or follow-up comments yet.

Thanks MickeyD. And off we go again!

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Will we ever get zero rated data for streaming services like Showmax, Netflix ZA and even DSTV's online components?

Never is a strong word. But I think that it’ll be difficult for any ISP to zero-rate any video streaming services. There are two main reasons for this: First, the time most people use these services is early evening to latish evening which coincides with (or creates) the peak usage time for the network. This means to service more clients at this time we need greater capacity on our network, which means that our costs go up. Secondly, these are amongst the most bandwidth intensive activities that someone can do (especially as streaming quality and speeds increase) which means these effects of needing more capacity are magnified further.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Why don't you use a Zest anymore?

We sold the Zest phone about 20 months ago, which is a long time in the smartphone world. Since then I have been tempted by the newer phones that have been released ;-) I sincerely believe that the Zest phone was a great phone for the price point it was sold at and when combined with 1GB of mobile data a month free for 12 months it was a great deal!

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Hi Gian. I am an IT lecturer at Varsity College in Digital Citizenship. Digital access to allow poor rural South Africans access to digital citizen ship is lacking. What modern technologies are being deployed by Afrihost to remedy this? I think the #feesmustfall and related events is expressing what needy and also capable south Africans need but can't get. Education. The solution is distance learning. Afrihost as a seemingly dynamic tech company can help solve this I think. Your comments will be good to hear.

I agree. Distance Learning is a solution to education challenge we have. I think affordable mobile solutions are the answer to getting the rural areas connected. Of course the technology is there to possibly achieve this (assuming there is cellular coverage in the area). However, mobile data is still relatively expensive to provide, and we are in effect reselling the mobile co's data. I think the spectrum issue could help solve this, if a condition of the new spectrum allocation is that the mobile co's taking it over need to provide truly affordable connectivity for the rural poor.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Do you have a contingency plan if a DDoS attack targets your DNS hosting infrastructure, similar to what happened to GoDaddy a few years ago?

I know this is a valid concern, and what I can say is that we plan as best we can for any eventuality we can foresee. A DoS or DDoS attack is one of the hardest things to combat, so I think my team would have concerns about me talking about our safeguards in a public forum like this. What I can say is that we keep our environment as up to date as possible with international best practices and we monitor closely for any sign of malicious activity. And when activity is detected we work to mitigate the attacks as best we can.

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

FTTH, in places where no one really cares. Please can you pull some strings to bring it to areas that actually want them ? Every, damm time "Sorry sir, you need 250 signatures in your area for us to lay down fibre cables". I'm not a salesman, they must get their own sh*t together. Anyways /rant-over, i have all my domains registered with you guys, love the work, keep it up

Thanks for your business! I wish I had the power to pull all those strings! I think though that due to the Fibre land grab that is going on at the moment many more areas will start to be covered over the next year, and hopefully yours is one of them!

 

[Afrihost-Gian]

Will afrihost mobile packages be discounted soon because most other operators like Telkom are cheaper.
For example mobile ten package is R497
Then you have to pay R99 for afrihost + double data so its R596 The same double data package is R329 at Telkom

I would absolutely love to offer even better value on our mobile packages. Unfortunately our direct input costs for mobile data have not changed for a long time. In fact our overall costs to deliver the service when you include other fixed running costs such as salaries and rent etc have in fact increased a fair whack. And the price we pay per GB is still actually more than the price per GB we charge our clients. Now I understand that none of this is your really your concern but I just wanted to explain why we are unable to easily decrease our mobile data costs for the short to medium term.