Being struck with the problem of finding a decent host for myScoop that isn’t going to cost me an arm and a leg in terms of bandwidth usage, I have decided to explore some of South Africa’s hosting companies and compare their prices with one another. Note that I have used their middle to premium packages to calculate their cost per megabyte for this exercise and all servers are located in South Africa, with Linux operating systems.
| Company | Bandwidth | Price | c/mb | Diskspace |
| Elite Host | 3000 mb | R 99.95 | 3.33c | 1500 mb |
| Elite Host | 4000 mb | R 129.95 | 3.24c | 2000 mb |
| Ample Hosting | 3000 mb | R 79.95 | 2.67 c | 3000 mb |
| Ample Hosting | 5000 mb | R 129.95 | 2.60 c | 5000 mb |
| Hetzner | 4000 mb | R 99.00 | 2.48 c | 1000 mb |
| Hetzner | 7000 mb | R 149.00 | 2.13 c | 2000 mb |
| Hetzner | 10 000 mb | R 279.00 | 2.79 c | 3000 mb |
| Hetzner | 15 000 mb | R 439.00 | 2.93 c | 4000 mb |
| Afrihost | 6000 mb | R 399.00 | 6.67 c | 3000 mb |
| Afrihost | 3000 mb | R 165.00 | 5.50 c | 1500 mb |
| Web Africa | 6000 mb | R 100.00 | 1.67 c | 250 mb |
| Web Africa | 12 000 mb | R 150.00 | 1.25 c | 750 mb |
| Web Africa | 25 000 mb | R 300.00 | 1.20 c | 2000 mb |
Please note: These prices were correct as per the various company’s websites at the time of writing this article.
Nice, I have been wanting to do a similar post now for some time. I see the WebAfrica packages is quite attractive for local hosting. Have you found a sponsor for myScoop bandwidth? If now what is the the average usage then I can ask around with my contacts.
Yeah, I even phoned WebAfrica to double check those prices. The only downfall may be the disk space allocation, but 2 gigs is enough for my requirements. myScoop will use around 4gigs of bandwidth this month, a 300% increase from last month. I predict it to go as high as 30-50gigs by the end of the year. This means a dedicated server will be needed at some point.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks Gerhard
Nice one Nic. Most of my sites are hosted with Hostgator but it’s a big problem. Two problems – server time and local time. Big difference. The other thing is that it will cost me a plain ticket abroad if they stuff up something to go sort them out. At least they are dirt cheap 🙂
Thats the problem with international hosting companies, although most of the time they do provide 24 hour support, its still an uncomfortable feeling knowing your pride and joy’s are based very far away from you 😉
I have sent an e-mail. I’ll let you know tomorrow if my contact can help you.
Thank you Deirdre, much appreciated!
Quite frankly, I’m no huge fan of local hosting. The speeds are great, the prices are acceptable, but the quality of the service quite plainly sucks. Having dealt with no less than 3 local hosts (2 of which are very well known), I’m not entirely convinced there’s enough brains in SA to run a hosting industry.
Either that or they all emigrated and started hosting companies of their own.
Given that larger, established international companies generally have the acumen to know what the hell they’re doing, I’ve found myself very partial to the services of http://bluehost.com (for wordpress sites, they got lots ram), and http://vpsville.ca (VPS hosting – dirt bloody cheap, incredibly stable, decent SA access speeds).
In the case of VPSville, their <a href=”http://www.vpsville.ca/vps-plans“>cheapest plan</a> works out on your grid like so:
VPSVille | 100 000 mb | R61/mo | 0.06c/mb | 5000mb
Been hosting a VPS with them for the better part of the last 18 months, and the service is rock solid. Just saying.
~ Wogan
Thanks for pointing out VPSville, Wogan. I had a look at their packages and it definitely seems like value for money, and like you said, they are dirt cheap and very stable, so it may just be worth a try…
You should check out http://www.osirion.co.za as well – very competitively priced! 🙂
Hello Nick 🙂
Please take a look at our new website. We have just launched our unlimited hosting (unlimited storage and traffic) both locally and internationally.
Regards,
Jason
http://www.elitehost.co.za