A couple of years ago bandwidth costs in South Africa were high and often people would run out of international cap after which it was only possible to view locally hosted websites. As a result, local server owners’ costs were much higher than that of their international counterparts.

Things have changed for the better in and we now have access to relatively low cost internet. The one thing that remains the same is the extremely high cost of renting space on a local server.

The Local Hosting Myths

Faster website loading
With the new Seacom cables and broadband connections getting faster there really is no noticeable difference in the loading time of local and international servers. Local servers may only be a few milliseconds faster because they are closer by. If you are still using a dial up connection (perish the thought) you may notice this difference, but seriously upgrade.

The speed that a website loads is also affected by the time of day that you are loading any particular page. Some times are busier than others and with so many people trying to pass data through a small pipe the connection speed suffers. This has nothing to do with were the server is hosted. I have heard other ‘local provider’ claim that international sites are 3X slower, I haven’t seen it, even on a GPRS connection.

Better Google Rankings
I have seen some web hosting providers using Google as a justification for the high price of local server hosting. They say that you will get better search ranking in South Africa if your site is hosted in South Africa. That is hysterical! Either they are trying to hoodwink their customers or they know nothing about search engine optimisation.

Firstly, when you search for something on Google, the default is “the web”. You have to specify if you want to see ‘pages from South Africa’.

Secondly, if your domain is .co.za or any other .za, it doesn’t matter where your server is located, it is still a South African page.

And lastly, if you are serious about having high Google rankings you will optimise your site for the search engines. That would include having South Africa mentioned in your site so that if someone specifies South Africa you will show up, regardless of your location.

Better Local Support?
Most local ISPs work local business hours. Some do offer 24 hour support and good turnaround times. International hosting providers offer 24/7 service. The people employed at the international support desks are well trained and fix problems quickly. It doesn’t help having a 1 hours turnaround time if you still have the problem 3 days later.

Uptime!
It has been claimed that local ISP’s lose their connection to international servers more frequently than with local servers. Once again, that is an old argument although it may have been true in the past, the increases in bandwidth and improved server technology has rendered that argument obsolete.

In Conclusion

If you still have doubts about using an international server to host your South African website there is still one thing to consider… price. Your local hosting will cost you, on average, 5 times more than international hosting. Whatever perceived issues their might be with international hosting, I can’t justify the cost.

Perhaps in the future when local server owners decide to start supporting the local market instead of profiteering from it, I will start to support them. Who knows, maybe ICASA will start turning the screws on them soon and we will be enjoying competitive pricing.

Until then, the 30 websites that I own will be hosted internationally along with the hundreds of happy client’s that I service.