Local hosting FAIL: webmail.co.za heads overseas...

Image Source: Uriel Law

An article today on MyBroadband.co.za has reported that webmail.co.za, one of South Africa’s premier free email services, has decided to thumb its nose at local hosting and buggered off to Europe. See this snippet from the original article (link) for more info:

South Africa’s largest free email service, Webmail.co.za, has recently moved the hosting of their servers internationally.  According to Netcraft the move took place around November 2009, and the new hosting location for Webmail is Nfrance Datacenter in Paris, France.

While the reasons behind this decision are not clear, it may be related to the high bandwidth costs associated with hosting services in South Africa.  In South Africa data costs of between 5c and 10c per MB for high end hosting services are commonplace – multiple times higher than international hosting services.

Naturally those users who access their webmail accounts on local-only bandwidth (cheaper) are getting a bit cranky, as they now no longer have that opportunity.

If it is in fact due to the cost of local hosting… then in my opinion I totally get it – local hosting is bloody expensive, and us South Africans are getting sick and tired of constantly playing catch-up to the rest of the world in all things connectivity. If however that is not their reason, my argument about costs is still valid.

A friend of mine has his company website hosted locally, and not only is it far more expensive than international hosting, his storage allocation and monthly traffic is severely limited by comparison.

When I made the move over from the free Google-hosted Blogger to self-hosted WordPress in November last year I went straight to foreign hosting, in this case provided by Hostgator (disclosure note: my affiliate link). For 60% of the price of local hosting I get unlimited storage, unlimited site traffic, and can even host an unlimited number of websites with them. Their technical help folks have also been instantly contactable via live chat 24 hours a day in my experience during the move – no submitting a ticket and then waiting a couple of days. So all in all a win for price, product and service.

As long as there is such a major discrepancy in what you get for your money this will not change – South African sites will continue to host overseas.