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If your monthly usage is 20gb for the website for downloading PDF documents and getting your employees to use FTP with a budget of R500 you'd be able to get a linux shared facility for R300 and get 25gb.
You're also not limited to anything, sure there'll be overusage charges. But as your website grows in popularity, you'd scale your solution.
And face it. Any business who are serious about their online presence and needs 20gb+ of data transfer a month for something like that has to be realistic and think about spending some money.
How much (in the long run) does it save you when you'd have to pay international data rates for downloading/uploading to your FTP? Sure you're saving a "massive" amount of money, having 15quaddrillion terabytes of data available to you for the low price of $9.95. But compare it with data rates you'd have to pay to actually transact from within SA on your server to be able to access your massive amount of data transfer available to that of how much local-only packages cost and you'll start to see it's not that "massive" of a saving to begin with.
Each to his own I guess, but let's say international goes down (which, face it, does happen several times a year). Does your business grind to a halt because you cannot access your FTP? (I know some companies who have, and an outage for longer than a day got ME in trouble nevermind Telkom)
You'd also have to remember, depending on the PDF size (which for web really shouldn't be more than 2mb really, depending on number of pages). You're going to get about 3000+ unique hits a month before reaching your "cap"
And that brings me 180 back to my previous point, if your data usage and clientele dictates the amount of bandwidth required to be more than 20gb, having a budget of R500 won't get you far if you're really popular and should scale accordingly (as any business should)
But even if you do grow a lot, you can still keep the traffic within SA and only go over your measly R500 budget with R100 and get 55gb of transfer instead of 25gb for R300. a bit more than double for R300 more.
Now provided, this does assume that your business within SA borders are focused here and not internationally, where it would then make sense to have your servers overseas.
But someone that has a website for inquiries about their tattoo parlor with photos of their creations which you can browse through, you're not going to do much traffic unless you're so ****ing awesome that everyone wants you and you're booked 6 months in advance for tattoos... but like i said, even then you're scaling your website to have more traffic/disk space for all your creations (some might even go as far as to use it as a tool for bookings)
I do about 400mb-1.1gb a month per website (I have 8) which is on average 500 unique users surfing my website (images loaded off of their respective owners servers)
So 1 website with that many unique users a month does roughly *max* 1.5gb of traffic a month (that's about 4 pages per user per visit and 3 visits a month per unique)
Assuming the same statistics. With 25gb you'll be able to serve 16.5x more users. That's roughly 8500 unique users, each visiting your site at least 3 times a month and view 4-5 pages each visit.
Now if my business interests were within the borders of South Africa, I'd want to leverage off of the local-only bandwidth and speed and get my server locally... that way I ensure the folks who do get capped can still visit my sites for cheap (or free, depending which ISP you have seeing as Telkom has free local) and keep getting the flow of users in.
With moderate to no-SEO from my part 500 uniques is still pretty bland, but lets say I put up Twitter/Facebook page and start to market my website even further. And let's assume it's a company website (taking from the tattoo parlor part) and I'd like to interact more with my customers and users... awesome.. I can *do just that* for cheap without having to host overseas.
And again, to re-iterate. If your company wants an online presence and wants to take hold of the power of word-of-mount online and marketing products online (even if you don't sell online) then it's a great start, and when you do explode, so will your budget because it's bringing in money that justifies the expenses of having the website hosted...
Good luck with your terabytes of data overseas when the cable breaks, especially when all the uncapped users nowadays uses Seacom
