[Question] SA webhosting

[IanF]

I have website PRINT IMAGE hosted locally by Hetzner. On the plan I use traffic of 1.5GB is allowed and extra traffic charged for. Now for 2 months I have gone over the traffic limit.

My reasons for local hosting were:

• Faster loading of website.
• Less chance of website being down due to too many links.
• People on local only web still being able to access the website and upload print files.

The advice I need are the above reasons still valid, as I can transfer the hosting to Germany and get a 20GB traffic limit at the same price, or just pay for the extra traffic.

[daveob]

Hi Ian

I have a dedicated server at Hetzner Cape Town as well as a site on a dedicated server at Hetzner Germany.

Web site browsing speed ( both servers have an identical web site ) between the 2 is not too different, but ftp transfer and mail server speeds ( and connection reliability ) are noticably much better / faster locally.

If speed is important to you, look at Hetzners dedicated server costs ( for the 'managed' servers ) and then build the excess traffic cost into the price of the job - clients won't be concerned about an extra R10 on a R1000 print job.

[IanF]

If speed is important to you, look at Hetzners dedicated server costs ( for the 'managed' servers ) and then build the excess traffic cost into the price of the job - clients won't be concerned about an extra R10 on a R1000 print job.

Dave
Thanks for the reply, the only critical speed factor is the file upload through my website. I bought a perl script for the file upload which then uses http. It works but would this be noticeably slower as we could always blame telkom for the slower uploads. I just tell my customers it is easier and better than sending me a 10 MB file by email due the overhead added by email.

[Dave A]

To be honest, I haven't noticed an international vs local difference in download/upload speeds for http or ftp requests once the file transfer starts. What is very different is the response time to each request which is something slightly different (about 7-8 times longer for international). This is more a problem when loading lots of little files rather than pulling one big one.

Emails are a different story though. I think POP requests in particular get put on the backburner when traffic volumes are high.