Zoopy moves its hosting overseas

portcullis said:
That's the problem we face when we try and do something unique.

We are only supported when there's no other option. As you just admitted "I went there when capped".

Maybe if more people went there when they weren't capped and bothered to click on the adverts, Zoopy wouldn't have had to move overseas.

I have a site that gets 21,000 page views a day. My option was several grand in bandwidth to keep it local, or £30 a month to host it in the UK.

Then there's the advertisers. 21,000 page views a day and Offerforge's stats show an average three or four clicks a day.

Four out of 21,000. Good on you South African Browsing Public.

Has anybody bothered to click on the banner ad on top of this page? If not, keep it up and see how long before rpm has to move the site overseas too.
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This is a good point portcullis. It's interesting that the original news of us moving to local servers didn't have a discussion thread attached to the article on MyBB: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Internet/5224.html. Hardly anyone on MyBB reacted to the good news. But this story about us moving internationally has a dedicated thread and loads of comments.
 
jasonzoopy said:
This is a good point portcullis. It's interesting that the original news of us moving to local servers didn't have a discussion thread attached to the article on MyBB: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Internet/5224.html. Hardly anyone on MyBB reacted to the good news. But this story about us moving internationally has a dedicated thread and loads of comments.
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Yeah it’s the “when you do good no one remembers, when you do bad no none forgets” scenario.

Does Alan Knott-Craig (Snr) not have a daughter you can marry? So you can continue to host it in the local Vodacom data centre and we can have local access to Zoopy.
 
Aargh no guys, a lot of you should honestly be ashamed of yourselves. You sit here and complain but when Zoopy receives their bandwidth bill at the end of the month, where are you?

I feel as sorry about the situation as the next person and really hope the situation improves soon so that Zoopy can move their hosting back but no person in their right mind can expect a startup to take out hundreds of thousands per month just for hosting.

Best of luck to Zoopy and let's hope the connectivity in South Africa gets sorted out sooner than later.
 
jasonzoopy said:
Thanks for the comments guys. Believe me when I say that this was a frustrating move, but one that we made in the best interests of growing Zoopy.

As a user, a local account may only cost a fraction of international bandwidth accounts out there but as a publisher, bandwidth costs come in at an average of R50/GB, meaning that it costs R50 000 per TB. Multiply that out across thousands of users per month and you're looking at 8-10 TB/month for a busy site (costing R400k - R500k per month), and much much more for a large publisher with millions of views.

This is the reason many companies still need to host internationally and until R50 000 / TB can compete with an average of $100 / TB offshore, it doesn't make sense for any business with large media files and thousands of users to host here. We look forward to the day that this changes and we can all afford to bring our servers back home and we are constantly looking at ways to make this happen.

In the meantime, Zoopy's loading of videos, photos and audio is just as quick (in fact it's even quicker most of the time) as any of the other social media sites that South Africans love to visit that are all hosted internationally, including Flickr, YouTube and Facebook.
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If you're paying R50.00 per gigabyte for your hosting and delivery of content locally then you really haven't done your homework well. A few points:

1. Anyone wanting to do business withy Vodacom or MTN is quite insane as all these two monsters are interest in is succking as much as they can out of their clients.

2. Bandwidth prices on Internet Solutions and their resellers now averages R 29.00 per GB. Companies like Afrihost provide ADSL subscribers with international bandwidth at R 29.00 per gigabyte sho it should make no difference whether they're fetching it locally or internationally.

3. I work for an international organisation that is in the process of developing a system for delivering audio and video content to internet users and cell phone users globally. We have over 50 years of radio programmes in multiple languages to make available to the global market. The most cost effective way to do this is through cloud computnig - eg. the Amazon cloud. You might want to consider this. Developing and hosting your own backend portal is just so archaic.
 
brentmin said:
If you're paying R50.00 per gigabyte for your hosting and delivery of content locally then you really haven't done your homework well. Bandwidth prices on Internet Solutions and their resellers now averages R 29.00 per GB. Companies like Afrihost provide ADSL subscribers with international bandwidth at R 29.00 per gigabyte sho it should make no difference whether they're fetching it locally or internationally.
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As I said, we were paying lower than the average, but even at R29/GB, it's R29 000 / TB vs $100 / TB. This is a massive difference when you're looking at 10TB+

brentmin said:
The most cost effective way to do this is through cloud computnig - eg. the Amazon cloud. You might want to consider this. Developing and hosting your own backend portal is just so archaic.
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We now have a far more cost and resource effective infrastructure which is ten times more affordable than S3 on the bandwidth side of things and far, far more economical than paying S3's storage cost, which you can imagine grows extremely quickly when you're storing videos, photo and audio for thousands of users on a cumulative basis.
 
charlvn said:
I feel as sorry about the situation as the next person and really hope the situation improves soon so that Zoopy can move their hosting back but no person in their right mind can expect a startup to take out hundreds of thousands per month just for hosting. Best of luck to Zoopy and let's hope the connectivity in South Africa gets sorted out sooner than later.
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Thanks Charl. We won't stop considering every opportunity to return to local hosting when the environment supports it.
 
Mephisto_Helix said:
Well that's a nice high-and-mighty handed response :rolleyes: Just because you've only had 3 (ja right) negative comments doesn't mean a whole lot of people aren't p1ssed off at the idiocy of your move.
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Idiocy ? Do you have any idea how to run a business that actually makes a profit ? I think you need to catch a wake up, this is not their fault but the fault of greedy South African ISP/Telecom/Whoever that continue to rip us off.
I fully understand why they have done this and do not hold it against them in the slightest.
 
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Hi Jason, please join ZA-FREE on Facebook and campaign for open access and free local-international bandwidth. Access to information should be a universal right. We have such rights in our constitution, but our government continues to act in a manner which is inconsistent with human rights. Our nations founding document even goes so far as to assert the freedom to receive or impart information i.e data.

Under article 16:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes
freedom of the press and other media;
freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;

The freedom to receive or impart information ie data has yet to be tested by our courts. Information is not simply ideas and the clause distinguishes between information OR ideas;

There are other parts of the constitution which protect the right to privacy of communications, but these rights have already been destroyed by the post-911 inspired RICA legislation. If we do nothing, the Bill of Rights is simply gutted by legislation which allows companies like Telkom to infringe our privacy and to charge exorbitant fees for the "right" to receive or impart information. The right therefore turns into a servitude. Where is the obligation? For any right to exist, there must be an obligation on the state to provide for the right.

Zoopy is doing a great job. It is the only site in South Africa to carry criticism of some large right-wing media companies who dominate the spectrum and should therefore remain anonymous. Zoopy has bravely created a platform for journalists and is a vital contributor to the battle against newsroom censorship. Keep up the great work. We hope to see Zoopy return to local bandwidth in the near future.
 
Joy-Energiser said:
Idiocy ? Do you have any idea how to run a business that actually makes a profit ? I think you need to catch a wake up, this is not their fault but the fault of greedy South African ISP/Telecom/Whoever that continue to rip us off.
I fully understand why they have done this and do not hold it against them in the slightest.
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lol, you need the wake up friend .... me and others expressing disappointment over not having access to Zoopy on Local Only anymore IS idiocy and obviously, if you can't access it, you can't carry on supporting it ;)


(Oh, and I have had a successful business just fyi, k)
 
Zoopy provided a great service while it was hosted locally, and it's sad to see it go international. Although it's offering the "whole package", it is now competing with the likes of youtube and imageshack, unfortunately. But I understand the costs of hosting locally, if on a smaller scale, as I host all my sites locally, with XboxGaming.co.za pulling GBs monthly. Even with it being on a scale no where near Zoopy, it still costs me hundreds of Rands a month, so seeing R400,000+ sounds about right. I've since moved my content off Zoopy and back onto local servers, but I'm having to juggle with complicated CDN setups to make sure I can still afford it. I just hope the local scene improves, and it has been helped by Webafrica's reduction in their pricing, but as mentioned, it's still nowhere enough to make a large, content intensive website viable within the borders of SA.

We need to see better peering agreements locally, as well as local-only hosting solutions to bring down prices, so that we can start providing international services locally. South Africans will only ever truely know what the full internet experience is when that happens.
 
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brentmin said:
3. I work for an international organisation that is in the process of developing a system for delivering audio and video content to internet users and cell phone users globally. We have over 50 years of radio programmes in multiple languages to make available to the global market. The most cost effective way to do this is through cloud computnig - eg. the Amazon cloud. You might want to consider this. Developing and hosting your own backend portal is just so archaic.
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yea and how much do they charge? And then it is in US dollars. I guess for someone earning in dollars its great, but doing the rand into dollar exchange is a blow. I feel for Zoopy. Bandwith costs for a startup is horrendous in this country. I've just moved a site internationally too. I only have a R1000 a month for hosting and bandwith. I get 700 gig included internationally, and there is no way I can afford 700 gig x R29 in South Africa. Luckily I dont have to worry about local users and their caps. Otherwise I would have considered charging them a premium for the bandwith they used.
 
All of you that are complaining have no idea what you are talking about.

I recently have had to take down my website. On average my personal website had 50-100GB of traffic per month, hosted locally.

Taking an average of 75GB per month, website hosted on WebAfrica servers. I would have to fork out R889 per month to keep my website hosted locally. I would like to see you do that on a student budget.
 
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SpoOkie said:
All of you that are complaining have no idea what you are talking about.

I recently have had to take down my website. On average my personal website had 50-100GB of traffic per month, hosted locally.

Taking an average of 75GB per month, website hosted on WebAfrica servers. I would have to fork out R889 per month to keep my website hosted locally. I would like to see you do that on a student budget.
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Yes, but Zoopy is no student website, now are they? Their advertising should cover the cost of the bandwidth including corporate sponsorship (which Vodacom failed at dismally). If MyBB can keep head above water and give out prizes and free stuff AND cope with the 150+gig per month they're doing (including the nice server farm they have) then I'm pretty sure Zoopy could do the same. However, in South Africa it's all about "what can I get for free" and nothing about "how would my service benefit South Africa?"

But each to his own I guess
 
Just to add on, there's also huge opportunity for advertisement on their site, especially if it pulls international visitors as well, playing with a bit of GeoIP would then serve international ads to international users and local to local (as an example) so their ad network could have reached other countries *IF* they actually monitored who their users were. If they're already doing that, then awesome, way to stay innovative.

Talking about "staying innovative" I'm wondering why they haven't integrated with Facebook Connect to open up their platform even more without having users register for a separate account and then PUBLISH and share videos easily on friend's walls. Too much effort?

There are so many things they could have done to monetize their site to the point where they cover costs or even make a profit which hasn't been explored yet. Took them a year to finally decide to just switch to international hosting? Would a CDN perhaps be less of an expense for all the international users they have? Perhaps. Can't see that they tried that option really.

Ugh. Anyway.... I have a beer that's starting to get warm... and it's all Zoopy's fault
 
SpoOkie said:
All of you that are complaining have no idea what you are talking about.

I recently have had to take down my website. On average my personal website had 50-100GB of traffic per month, hosted locally.

Taking an average of 75GB per month, website hosted on WebAfrica servers. I would have to fork out R889 per month to keep my website hosted locally. I would like to see you do that on a student budget.
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Do not underestimate the amount of people who visits locally hosted sites because their international bandwidth cap has been depleted. Read MyBB you will hear many references being made. That’s a lot of eyeballs. With that many bandwidth being used like Zoopy means lots of views. They could have sold their sites entire background as advertising or wrapped their video in a branded video player - like a box of OMO with a screen in the middle :D
 
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