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We regularly have contact with customers that are moving their servers and hosting from overseas providers back to South Africa. This trend is interesting and there are several reasons for it. You can purchase a hosting service in the US, but usually the latency is between 280ms-400ms and on bad days (eg Seacom outages) it can be higher. Locally hosted content however is on average 10 times faster with latency around 25ms.

What has changed?

How is this relevant in South Africa you may ask? Our internet speeds are increasing as fibre, VDSL and LTE rollout, latency is also decreasing as more content is hosted locally with content caching services like our AfriCDN, Google cache and other providers put more content locally. This means users are getting used to a more stable, lower latency local internet experience.

Its all about happy eyeballs

Google studied the impact that a near undetectable (to a human) additional 300ms (0.3 seconds) had on the users behavior. The result was that users disengaged from the site at a relatively alarming rate of between 5-8%.

Many people are unaware, but recently South Africa had only 1 operational international submarine cable, with 3 others undergoing emergency maintenance. Several large consumer ISP’s had performance problems to US and UK hosted websites however if your app/website/system was locally hosted, you would have experienced no issues and that translates to happy customers.

Serving your content from overseas higher latency servers may unknowingly be costing you customers and losing revenue.

Isn’t it more expensive?

The other misconception is that local hosting is expensive, this was the case until recently but this has fundamentally changed. The local monopoly of Telkom is being challenged, bringing input costs down significantly and thus our price to you.

All in all, if your users are local, it makes sense to host locally.

With our new Cloud Servers v3 product going live last week we’ve had great feedback and suggestions from customers, thanks to everyone! The more feedback we get the better we can make the product for everyone.

This week sees a 4 major updates we have made to Cloud Servers, check them out below:

1. Traffic Price Drops

We have dropped our traffic pricing by 50%! Down from R5 per GB to R2,50 per GB. At the time of publishing this blog post we offered the cheapest cloud per GB bandwidth pricing in the country.

2. Easy Console Install

Some customers were having a bit of trouble getting the required console  plugin installed. We made it simpler by adding a setup wizard explaining what is needed for each operating system and browser. Please note that console for MAC is currently still not supported by VMware, we hope to have this resolved shortly.

3. Fullscreen Console 

There were a couple of issues with certain resolutions when it came to viewing the console. Some vertical and horizontal scrolling was necessary :/. This has been fixed with a full screen feature so that you no longer have to work in a small window.

4. Recommended Resources

We had reports of some servers not running very well, this was due to running certain high resource intensive operating systems with the minimum resources selected. We now recommend the ideal minimum running requirements for each server upon server creation. We advise that nobody drop below the recommended amounts to avoid possible performance issues.

We still have a lot of features and improvements to make to the product. Keep checking out our blog for all the latest updates!

Below you are able to see when our next free cloud workshop is scheduled for.
We update this schedule regularly based on demand.

Last Cloud Workshop was: 19th April 2013

Next Cloud Workshop is: No date set at this time.

If you keen to attend an even let us know in the comments or contact us directly.

As a company we are so behind cloud infrastructure that we want everyone to try it. We have dropped prices to the floor in order to allow you  the opportunity to try our cloud servers. With pricing this good whats your excuse?

All the info and cloud pricing can be found on the RSAWEB cloud page.

Check out the race report below from Renay who had an awesome weekend at Buffet Olives where he came in 1st place against some very determined competition. Next for Renay is Wines to Whales next weekend, were we expect great things from him! 

With the Wines to Whales stage race fast approaching, I am busy putting the final touches on my training to ensure that I’m on top form to take a podium with my team mate Matthys Beukes. Some of the best training you can do is racing itself, so on Sunday morning I found myself on the start line ready to take on the Buffet Olives MTB challenge.

With me on the starting line I had some strong riders with the likes of previous winner Adriaan Louw (Contego 28e) , Dominic Calitz (Daiken) and emerging talent Louw Kriel. With the route only being 42km I wasn’t sure if it would be long enough for the type of training I was hoping for, but boy was I wrong!

The route turned out to be much tougher than expected, with lots of steep climbing, undulating forest roads and plenty of fun single-track to keep us on edge.

From the very beginning of the race it was apparent that my legs were very tender from the training I had been doing during the week before. Adriaan, Dominic and myself hit the first long climb of the race, and as I pushed the pace a bit, I was able to open up a small gap on them and see what their limits were.  Unfortunately for me the sore legs meant that I was also at my limit, but I managed to keep the pressure on never the less.

To my amusement Adriaan lingered in the background never more than 500m behind me, but luckily for me was not able to close the gap.  This continued throughout the whole race and had me on edge as he was never far behind…

Fortunately I was able to push the pain barrier and hold my wits to take my second win in a row with Adriaan a mere 2 minutes behind me, and with Dominic cruising into 3^rd place.

This week sees me putting in some last minute training before taking a nice taper towards Wines to Whales, the last race of the season!

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