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Some of the guys at RSAWEB were discussing Local VS International Cloud hosting…an exciting topic (for us anyway!) and it was interesting to note how much the discussion has changed over time.

Only a few years ago – most of us would have said that International Cloud Hosting was a better and cheaper option for all, and even despite us being an ISP (Internet Service Provider) – we knew it would be difficult to complete with the International powerhouses such as Amazon et al.

Today though, this has changed massively, due in part to cheaper, faster traffic, and also due to the fact that South African ISP’s have invested heavily in order to perform on a global scale, and offer true value to SA users – with International standard SLA’s to boot. 

Read more to find out about the benefits of choosing a local supplier for your Cloud Hosting.

Local Cloud Hosting – The Benefits

• Local Support and Maintenance – Got a problem? With local hosting it’s simple to chat to someone who speaks your language, understands you and is in your own timezone! When opposed to international, where is gets tricky, this is an easy win!
• Latency – Hosting Internationally can cause you lots of latency issues, however when hosting locally lag time is greatly reduced.
• Data Sovereignty – If this is an issue for your organisation, it’s always best to host local, where your data will be stored on your own soil.
• User Experience – Slow load times lead to high bounce rates and unhappy customers. By hosting locally, SA users will experience lightening fast load times.
• Low Bandwidth Prices – Competition within the market has caused bandwidth prices to come down drastically, with many ISP’s having really cheap hosting costs (we do for less than R3 per GB on some packages – check it out here)
• Independent: By hosting in SA – should there be international connectivity issues, you won’t be affected. (However bear in mind that the opposite is true!)

Find out more about our Cloud Hosting packages by looking here, have any questions? Just ask us in the comments section and we’ll get back to you!

Developers, designers and the digitally minded of Cape Town take note: SA’s premier WordPress Conference WordCamp is coming to Town on the 4th October.

We knew we had to get involved with WordCamp given our history and passion for hosting WordPress websites, everything from small personal blogs to media companies publishing content on a large scale.

WordCamp has an amazing global reputation as the premier WordPress community event, and the Cape Town event is no different. Now in it’s third year, the events hosts the creme of local and International WordPress guru’s and is a great networking opportunity for anyone in the industry.

What you need to know:

• Date: 4th October at Kirstenbosch Old Mutual Conference Centre
• Tickets: There are still tickets available – so get yours today to ensure you don’t miss out.
• Schedule  and Speaker Line-Up (our very own Director Mark Slingsby will be speaking too!)
• Check out this highlights video below to find out more about WordCamp.

To find out more about WordCamp – follow them on Twitter and Like their page on Facebook.

We meet with businesses everyday to discuss their IT needs, and of course, we always advocate the move into the Cloud, and have been for the last few years, but increasingly we have to deal with common business and individual misconceptions about Cloud Computing. We thought we’d take some time to tell you our most common questions and answers. Enjoy!

1. It’s just a Technology Fad

The last time you sent an email from Gmail, or logged into Twitter to send a funny tweet, you were using Cloud Computing. Most people use and interact with Cloud Computing software as a service platforms (SaaS) on a daily basis, yet they may not realise it. Businesses, Schools, and Governments from all across the world are using Cloud Computing and year on year Cloud adoption has increased at a rapid rate. Rather than considering Cloud Computing as a fad, consider it as a powerful shift in the way we can harness technology, and utilise the many services available free on the web! (Think: Dropbox, or Flickr)

 2. The Cloud is not Secure 

There is generally a feeling that due to the intangible nature of cloud (being not a ‘physical thing’ per se) that it’s not safe. This is not the case, and in many ways, Cloud Computing affords much more security than an organisation could arrange independently or via an in-house data centre or server. For ISP’s like us, security is the foundation of our business, and we invest heavily in ensuring that our clients data is secure. We actually find that data is typically lost when an organization loses control over it, including how it’s stored, how it’s shared, how it’s secured and what its end users do with it. By handing control over to a service provider, this risk is diminished. The truth is that cloud-computing is a godsend to small and medium-sized business that could have never before afforded the top-tier data center and security technology that they can now afford by utilizing Cloud Computing.

3. Cloud Computing is more expensive

Whilst we understand that moving to Cloud may confront you with some of upfront costs, we truly believe that in the moving to the Cloud will, in time, save your business a whole wad of cash. As well as power, hardware and bandwidth, we’ll also help you save massively on IT management costs. Check out our pricing structures to see for yourself. Another great thing about Cloud Computing is that it means you can expect monthly, predictable bills which makes IT financial planning much simpler.

4. The (Incorrect) Notion that Virtualisation = Cloud 

As VP of Business Development at Rackspace said ‘”The misconception is that virtualization is cloud. Virtualization has become widely adopted in the enterprise for server consolidation. It’s an enabling technology, but the cloud is really about automation. People tend to connect popular virtualization technologies with the cloud, and if you look at the clouds out there they’re not built on these same virtualization technologies.” We couldn’t agree more, we were the first ISP in SA to develop ‘True Cloud’ servers, that can be provisioned online, automatically, and so we spend a lot of our time communicating the difference between Virtualisation and Cloud.

5. Dual Points of failure 

Since our clients rely on us for both their hosting, and their connection to the internet, they often worry about dual points of failure, which is understandable. However, up-time (like security) is the cornerstone of our business, we spend lots of time and money ensuring that our clients enjoy 99.99% uptime, and have many measures to ensure this (such as automatic traffic re-direction in the event of downtime).

We consider ourselves experts in the field of Cloud, and we actively encourage asking us questions, so feel free to reach us via email, Twitter or Facebook.

You can also visit our site to find out more about Cloud Computing – check out our Cloud 101 resource.

Today we announced the release of our new aggregated ADSL product, SuperPIPE, which can deliver download speeds up to 50 mb/s.SuperPIPE works by aggregating multiple  ADSL lines into a single fault tolerant high speed connection of up to 50 mb/s that can be managed as simply as a single ADSL connection.

We’ve found that Telkom have been far too slow in rolling out faster speeds for business and consumers alike, and although they have just announced their 20 and 40 mb/s ADSL pilots,we think that this will be unattainable for many and limited to certain areas.

SuperPIPE has been built to fill this gap in the market. There is currently a huge gap in price, speed and reliability between Fibre connectivity, which allows speeds from 10 Mb/s up to 10Gb/s but at a higher cost, than ADSL which tops out at 10Mb/s. SuperPIPE bridges this gap by offering Fibre like throughput at competitive pricing with some inherent reliability.

SuperPIPE is available today in capped and uncapped packages. Installation time is also greatly reduced to weeks rather than months as is currently the norm with Fibre connections.

SuperPIPE Features: 

1. Fault Tolerant: with automatic uninterrupted failover
2. Speed: Significantly higher throughput than normal ADSL
3. Aggregated (Not Bonded) Upload and download speeds aggregate 50 mb/s up and down.
4. Quality of Service Guaranteed: Enabling VoIP and Video Conferencing along with other bandwidth hungry applications.
5. Flexibility: 5 public IP addresses or private IP’s
6. SuperPIPE is available across South Africa today!

Do you have any questions and SuperPIPE? If so, email us today and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. 

We’ve got great news for all of our Capped DSL customers! Free bandwidth upgrades for all!! Woohoo!

Due to massive recent growth within our ADSL subscriber market, combined with the expansion our network, we’re now able to offer you the most competitive Capped ADSL pricing we’ve ever had!

We really mean business – so you can expect up to a 50% off on some of our packages!

What’s more, Telkom is increasing speeds across all lines which means extra happiness for everyone!

To refresh your memory:  1 Mbps lines are going up to 2 Mbps and 384k are going up to 1 Mbps.

The good news from our side is that if RSAWEB manages your line for you, you can still save almost 20% each month on line rental – plus you can deal with our fast and friendly support team for all line related questions, so no more waiting in call centre queues!

Read More

To celebrate the opening of our awesome new deck at the RSAWEB Cape Town office we’re having a Keg party! We’re over half way through winter and so, in the spirt of ushering in the warmth of Summer we’ll be drinking in the view, the sunshine and some yummy Mitchell’s beer from 4:30 today.

All friends and clients of RSAWEB are welcome, office location on this MAP. For non-beer drinkers, we’ll have plenty soft drinks. Plus, we have a table tennis table to keep you occupied and we might even have a cheeky beer pong game, so escape the rush hour traffic and pull in for a pint or two.

You’re a small business owner, and you want access to all of the great software that your larger competitors use but at a rate that suits your pocket. 10 years ago this might have been difficult right? Nowadays thanks to Cloud Computing – this is a reality. This article will take you through all of the Cloud Software Service benefits for small businesses, to allow you to utilise Cloud to its maximum potential.

Now, let’s start with the basics – what is Cloud Software Services – or SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is all around you every time you go online, it’s Zimbra, DropBox, Twitter and Skype – any service you provision online either for free, or paid is software as a service via the Cloud. It’s an on-demand software delivery model in which software and the associated data (think emails/ files) are centrally hosted on the Cloud, allowing you to access them from anywhere. SaaS has now become a very popular delivery models for many businesses such as Accounting, CRM, HR, and content management systems.

The Benefits Cloud Software Services for small businesses:

1) Cost – Almost all small companies need to watch their costs closely, Cloud computing allows small business to access great online services for a margin of the cost of traditional software. For example: Microsoft Outlook 2010 costs around R809.00 for the boxed version, however, Zimbra, which offers multiple productivity tools via the Cloud can be provisioned for as low as just R49 p/m. In addition to this, many Cloud computing solutions are pay-as-you-go and don’t require a lot of money up-front – plus, they are predictable payments (so no scary bills jumping out of the darkness!)

2) Enterprise Class Functionality – We’ve touched on this above, but today, small companies can truly enjoy world class software for a fraction of what it would have previously cost.  Large companies have the cash to fund custom functionality, small companies don’t – however, in the cloud, they can leverage development, upgrades and maintenance across the Cloud for their own business.

3) Legacy Issues – A common issue large corporates  face when moving into the Cloud is how their legacy applications and systems will cope. Luckily, smaller businesses are nimble enough to be able to move into the Cloud simply, and have less complex legacy apps to contend with. Some Cloud hosting (like us) can host legacy apps anyway – which allows multiple offices to connect to a centralised secure service so that reports can be generated live and in real time. Win win both ways for small businesses.

4) Less IT Hours – Small businesses typically can’t afford to shell out copious amounts of hard earned cash on IT support – with SaaS, all software updates are done by the service provider, meaning IT support can be spent on adding strategic value instead of slaving away on menial tasks.

5) Security – SaaS usually affords small businesses far better security than they could provide themselves. Plus since your documents and data are stored in the Cloud, there are far less chances of them going missing, being deleted or copied, which is also great for compliance needs!

6) Scaleability – Since your software is all Cloud based – you can grow your business and staff force as quickly as you like, and only pay a small fee per employee. Having a quiet period? Scale back down, no costly capital expenditure whatsoever to worry about.

7) Availability – Cloud makes it possible for your companies emails, calendars, documents and apps to be available worldwide, which makes employees far more productive and allows for your small business to become truly Global and tap into the benefits of outsourcing and decentralised workplaces.

So we’ve summed up in 7 points why the Cloud is great for small businesses, if you’re interested in chatting to us about Cloud Computing for your business, check out or site or drop us a call. We offer the following great SaaS products: Hosted Exchange, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and online back-up.