Hosting in South Africa: Does uncapped work?

Do you think uncapped hosting will attract new customers?

  • Yes

    Votes: 23 62.2%

  • No

    Votes: 14 37.8%
  • Total voters
    37
This isn't a true reflection though, we can't simply look at one variable and judge from that since service levels received from providers are not fixed. MWEB has a very slow response to their helpdesk, causing the fluctuations in the number of domains hosted. It looks like consumers are going for service levels hence why Hetzner and Afrihost are up, despite the fact that their product offering is not as attractive as MWEB.
 
I recently transfered 4 domains from H4A to Mweb and it was a nightmare. Mweb does not have the foggiest idea of how to do it and in each case I had to spend hours on the phone trying to get them to update their domain files in order to route traffic going to my sites to the correct server on their side.

They really are utterly useless.
 
Rouxenator said:
I recently transfered 4 domains from H4A to Mweb and it was a nightmare. Mweb does not have the foggiest idea of how to do it and in each case I had to spend hours on the phone trying to get them to update their domain files in order to route traffic going to my sites to the correct server on their side.

They really are utterly useless.
Click to expand...

That is exactly my argument, MWEB's hosting technical support is just not up to scratch. I think if MWEB had the same service levels as Hetzner and offered their Uncapped hosting product then they would be on top. Anyway for us Unlimited hosting has done well, but then again we've kept our service levels up to the same standard as before, if not better :)
 
Hetzner and Afrihost has top notch technies that knows WTF they're doing and doesn't beat around the bush (much). Whereas MWEB and WA's "engineers" are...well... n00b.

It took a hosting company (that will remain unnamed) several *months* to secure a dedicated server at MWEB. Compared to the 2-3 day wait at Hetzner or Afrihost.

It doesn't matter what product you launch. If the quality of service is ****, so shall be your sign-up roster. I'm not the best in my selected field, but the clients I do have uses me (even though they can find cheaper) because they know they're getting quality support. And that is key.
 
Looking at the graphs from the article, mweb domain hosting went down by 11 domains over a 1 month period, in comparison to the other providers.

I think those graphs would be more meaningful if they were to the same scale and overlaid over each other.
 
MWEB does not seem to want new clients as well. Contacted them a few weeks ago regarding hosting. Could not get hold of anyone on thd phone. Emails are not answered, etc. At least their uncapped ADSL is still working pretty good!
 
I dunno about others but i heard a lot of people who tried moving to mweb, found the su[port etc crap and moved back. So uncapped has a market yes, but you can't just have uncapped and a lesser service either.
 
Hetzner is the biggest, because they have been around the longest, even before there was a company called MWeb.

I have been hosting sites with them since '96.

Not sure they are still the best around, but people seem to trust them because of this long track record.
 
Hosting has a more unique market compared to ADSL which has far more residential users, so uncapped hosting won't take off as fast as ADSL did.
 
I think JasonH nailed it. This isn't a true reflection of whether the uncapped offering is sought after or not, but more on the service levels of these providers. With competitive local hosting packages being offered for some time now, consumers have had time to test the waters, and it's no longer just a matter of "host at X if you want local hosting because they don't cost you an arm and a leg". Webafrica and Mweb's hosting sign-ups have dipped, and while I haven't had any experience with Mweb, I can attest to Webafrica's utter incompetence and terrible service levels when it comes to their web hosting.

I think what this article actually reveals is that not only is the local hosting market maturing (more uncapped offerings), but so are local consumers (that's us!) and the need for quality over cost is finally taking preference.
 
AcidRaZor said:
It took a hosting company (that will remain unnamed) several *months* to secure a dedicated server at MWEB. Compared to the 2-3 day wait at Hetzner or Afrihost.
Click to expand...

Not our experience with them, granted, it's a sample of one but MWeb has us up and running on a dedicated server within 5 days, software wasn't included in the deal but he said he'd save us the trip to the D/C to install our software and get 'fensters' server installed and leave us to type in our serial number later...

great service, but perhaps it was more about the techie we had assisting...

D
 
What I can say is that Host4Africa was brilliant and I really regret moving away from them. I paid them R9.99 and my domains did in excess of 30gb international traffic per month. Not only that but their technical support us top notch, fast replies with the exact answers you want. They go out of their way to accommodate you.

Mweb is the exact opposite.

OMFS I get so mad thinking of how bad Mweb uncapped hosting is :mad:
 
Someone should mention in that article that those figures _only_ include international domains and do not include any .co.za domains so it's not a true reflection at all.
 
Well, I think I will just repeat what some have said as I think it needs to be driven home on this article. Average article due to the major missing factor of customer satisfaction with the Call Centre and overal hosting reliability. I think this should be explored along with the uncapped issue. Certainly not telling the whole story.
 
So by what I read here is: Uncapped hosting from MWeb will do nothing to get more customers because of the fact that their support is very crap and not the uncapped!
 
Mweb needs to grow their hosting and broadband business, and as such have chosen to thoughtlessly throw pieces of the services differentiators around as if it is inconsequential, cheap and abundant - which it is not. I guess the plan is to look at quality of service after growing a substantial client base of opportunistic (ab)users, and hope that they're able to cope with the capacity requirements until then.

Hetzner and the like will follow(and are probably more capable of winning the pissing contest) just to show that they can, and to stay in the limelight I guess.

Until recently ISP's (hosting) differentiated their different product tiers on Diskspace and Bandwidth allocation, showing us where the value lies. What does this say about where the value lies in our hosting services now though? Everything is cheap and there are no limits :)

It seems to me these guys are slowly and willingly diminishing the value of their own industry. There's no coming back from giving everything away for (almost)free. WHat do you say? Not economically viable anymore? Will your support staff also take pay cuts while your revenue drops (or at best and maybe with the help of increased client base - flat lines against inflation)?

I hope they got other skills and services they can diversify into - Hetzner life insurance anyone?

SO ye, unlimited, uncapped, cheap - GREAT!!!...or is it?
 
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