Hey Everyone!
I've been a long-time client of Hetzner in South Africa. Since '96 in fact and their service have been so good I've not really shopped around much. All these years I used their managed server offerings, but in 2011 I moved from a Windows desktop to a Linux one (briefly stopping on Ubuntu before settling with Mint) - I was just done with commercially provided binaries and lock-in on my hardware. This year I switched over our servers to root servers too (with much help from the SA Drupal community).
In the EU (Germany) I now got all our servers from Hetzner DE (The two companies, Hetzner.de and Hetzner Africa here in South Africa are not the same company and their service offerings differ. On top of the root servers with Hetzner.de I also got some Virtual Servers. They're so cheap and perform so well I get them by the dozen. Locally Hetzner doesn't offer the same solution.
Hetzner Africa Root Servers in SA:
http://www.hetzner.co.za/dedicated-servers/truserv/truserv-commerce
Hetzner.de Root Servers:
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex
Hetzner.de Virtual Servers:
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq7
I was hoping we could have some discussion on South African hosting options. What we all use and our impressions with the service providers here.
From the other people I speak to, I also see a lot of Drupal shops locally hosting SA sites internationally. I still prefer to host my SA clients locally and my clients seem to appreciate that, but some impressions from you guys on whether your clients find this essential and if you consider it a worth-while trade-off hosting them internationally for your preferred service would be interesting.
Finally, I also hear a lot about the big cloud-based solutions being used by Drupal shops and company teams here. Does any of them offer South African end points?
Comments
The virtual server
The virtual server environment in ZA is still very small largely due to the fact that you get cheaper better options abroad. Even with the recent improvement in bandwidth allocation and price the current options are sub-par by international standards; that said best option I have found so far is Afrihost.
At some point VPS.net will be manking an entry into the country which could shake things up but they are taking their time. Back in March they were still trying to choose a local provider and based on their other locations around the world the price will most likely be at a premium.
I currently use Linode mainly because they are just plain awesome and because a UK end point is the next best thing to a local server.
As for the "cloud" based platforms they are designed to deploy a lot of servers in a short amount of time where scaling and redundancy are critical or where you only need them for a specific amount of time. I find that they only become truly economical once you start scaling up.
Personally I would love to start hosting locally but only once it becomes viable to do so.