Who hosts who?

South Africa’s hosting environment is getting increasingly competitive with companies such as Teraco, MTN Business, Neotel, Vodacom Business, Business Connexion and Telkom Cybernest all investing heavily in their data centres.

Many of these data centres are primarily used for hosted services of corporate clients like financial institutions, and are therefore not as well known as some consumer brands like MWEB, Hetzner, Afrihost and Web Africa.

While corporate clients are typically high revenue/profit customers, having popular web content hosted in a data centre typically gives the host more negotiation power when it comes to peering agreements.

MWEB’s decision in 2010 to stop paying for local transit – forcing other service providers to peer with them directly – highlighted the challenge to negotiate peering agreements with the likes of Telkom, Internet Solutions and MTN Business.

The rule is usually “he with the most content on its network wins”. This means that the ISP which received more traffic than they send through a peering link must typically pay for the traffic (hence pay for local transit).

While this model clearly favours hosting companies over broadband providers, it still seems to hold.

This raises the question of which providers are hosting South Africa’s largest traffic generating websites.

The following table lists SA’s largest websites with their respective hosting providers.

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