I’m not one to become a product or service “evangelist” (to borrow a phrase from modern-day marketers) but this is a special circumstance. We’ve been looking for a way to host our e-Learning content online. I’m not convinced the South African market is ready for streaming video from the web but there are instances when it may be the only option. So, we went looking for a web-hosting solution that would meet our needs.
We basically wanted a service that offered enough hosting space, a lot of bandwidth and one in which we could be confident that it wouldn’t fall over if the traffic picked up considerably (this was a real concern given that we are serving videos over the web, not just HTML and graphics).
We were advised by a local company in the hosting hardware game to contact a web hosting company (Let’s call them Company X) who are well known and respected. I met with representatives from Company X who told me my costs would be broken down into two areas: Hosting space and bandwidth and that there were only specific packages available. I would be charged for any extra space or bandwidth I didn’t use in the month. I mentioned to them during the meeting that I had been considering hosting internationally and I asked them for their opinion on this and the benefits they felt their service could offer over an international option.
They listed the following benefits:
- Local so I can call them or visit them to check on my server
- International bandwidth can become congested at peak times for the US
- There is normally a 300ms delay in requesting data from US hosted servers.
They quoted me for the bandwidth component of our requirement which came in at a cool R6,000 per month. I thought this sounded high but when you worked it out per Megabyte it was cheap by South African standards.
I had heard about Amazon’s business services and, looking for other options, went to check out their Simple Storage Services (S3). I used their online calculator and plugged in both the hosting and bandwidth requirements. The total monthly cost came out at…
wait for it…
$9
I checked it again just to be sure but the numbers were right. $9 versus R6,000… So what Company X was telling me was that 99% of their costs were for the pleasure of visiting them. And let’s not forget the 300ms delay time… I think I can live with that!
Better still, Amazon’s service is completely flexible – there are no “packages” which expire at the end of the month, you only pay for exactly what you use. So the $9 was the comparative cost for using the entire package that Company X offered us and more (since the $9 included the hosting space).
Now the Amazon service is not a “normal” hosting service that many of us are used to. It’s not accessible via FTP for one (FTP is a technology for transferring information to and from a webserver, so you can upload new data), and it’s targeted primarily at web-developers. This means there are a few more hoops to jump through than usual to take advantage of the service. (Those of you who are developers will be interested to check out Amazon’s other business services including their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is meant for massive outsourced data processing.)
The FTP access was an issue to me initially since I didn’t then have any way of actually using the service without doing some web-development to build a facility to do so (something I don’t know how to do). Then I found the S3 add-on for Firefox and that sealed the deal. It works just like an FTP program but built especially for the Amazon S3 service (and it’s free of course).
We’ve already added a load of files to our account in support of our e-Learning service and got our bill for last month – R3.50. There are other users of the service that have synchronised their hard-drives with their accounts on Amazon and use them as a backup facilities. All for the princely sum of about R7.00 a month (This of course excludes the exorbitant rate you pay for uploading the content through your South African based ISP).
I took these facts back to Company X, just to hear their opinion. To their credit they answered my email candidly to say that the Amazon service was the obvious choice. In their defence, they are victims of the same ridiculous telecommunications bureaucracy we all are. The only way they can hope to compete is if their market is in the dark about the options available to them. I knew that a South African service would be more expensive, but never to the degree that I found. I was certainly shocked.
In concluding, I would first recommend the Amazon service to anyone wanting to host anything online and, second, I can only hope that our government wakes up to the fact that web-hosting companies in South Africa are completely at risk of being run out of the market. The government strangles their ability to offer competitive rates while not defending their ability to compete at all. The only thing protecting them is an asymmetry of information between service providers and their market.
