ANC, DA, and EFF – Two host locally, one internationally

All the major political parties promote the support of South African businesses, but when it comes to website hosting, some parties are supporting international hosts rather than local companies.

MyBroadband looked at where the prominent political parties’ websites are hosted, which revealed that the ANC and EFF’s websites are hosted locally while the DA hosts internationally.

The ANC’s website uses Afrihost’s Cloud service for its hosting, while the EFF is using Hetzner’s South African platform.

Apart from supporting local data centres, hosting a website locally also improves the experience for users with lower latency.

The DA’s website, however, is hosted in Germany on Hetzner Online GmbH’s platform.

It is not clear whether the DA proactively selected an international host, or whether it appointed a technology partner which made the decision on its behalf.

DA comments

The Democratic Alliance told MyBroadband that it unfortunately cannot comment on details regarding its website being hosted internationally.

The party did however say it has significant local infrastructure across a large number of branch offices and in data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

“We do business with a great many South African technology partners and support providers on a provincial and national basis,” the DA said.

“Significantly, we also invest heavily in developing our own campaign software infrastructure rather than buying campaign solutions from abroad.”

The DA said it works with a large pool of talented freelance software developers and development houses in South Africa.

“For security reasons, some of our infrastructure is hosted in a country which has stricter data protection regulations than South Africa,” the DA said.

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