Big data centre growth in SA

[Newsfeed]

Big data centre growth in SA

Turner & Townsend has released its Data Centre Cost Index 2019, which shows that South Africa’s data centre industry is thriving.

According to the report, Johannesburg its largest data centre market in Africa – twice the size of Cape Town.

 

[Bryn]

Maybe someone in the industry can provide some insight for this issue I have with South African hosting:

Why is the server response/time-to-first-byte so appalling in this country?

Doesn't matter what host any site uses, they're almost all 200+ms. Usually 300-500ms but often even the better part of a full second or more. This is despite accounting for international latency when using benchmarking utilities. The best I've seen is a particular site almost getting as low as 100ms but with wild inconsistency.

Without a single exception, the only local sites I have ever come across with fast TTFB are using a premium CDN with local nodes.

Why on Earth is this?! Is South Africa wired up atrociously or something? TTFB should be =<30ms, which is what you get with any Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. etc server. It is crazy that you can get faster load times by adding international latency to international TTFB instead of dealing with local TTFB. When you're aiming for <1 second load times per page, wasting half or most of that amount of time on the server response is absurd and makes the task almost impossible.

 

[Joseph matane]

Why there is no provincial data centres in remain 6 provinces? I know we have Johannesburg Internet Exchange Durban Internet Exchange and Cape Town Internet Exchange
Bloemfontein Internet Exchange
Kimberley Internet Exchange
Port Elizabeth Internet Exchange
Nelspruit Internet Exchange
Polokwane Internet Exchange
Mahikeng Internet Exchange

 

[ToxicBunny]

Why there is no provincial data centres in remain 6 provinces? I know we have Johannesburg Internet Exchange Durban Internet Exchange and Cape Town Internet Exchange
Bloemfontein Internet Exchange
Kimberley Internet Exchange
Port Elizabeth Internet Exchange
Nelspruit Internet Exchange
Polokwane Internet Exchange
Mahikeng Internet Exchange

Because there isn't enough data peering at those locations to justify the IX hardware... As for dcs in those areas, doubt there is enough demand either.

 

[Joseph matane]

Because there isn't enough data peering at those locations to justify the IX hardware... As for dcs in those areas, doubt there is enough demand either.

Thanks for brief summary

 

[ToxicBunny]

Thanks for brief summary

Always a pleasure...

It would be awesome if we had the demand and such on those areas to justify DC buildouts and such.... it would be a great sign of how our economy is doing actually.