South African broadband consumer activist website MyADSL pays more than R10 000 a month to host its website locally when it could host it overseas for a mere R700.
These exorbitant local hosting costs are causing South Africa’s ICT sector to fall behind international standards as content developers are prevented from using multimedia delivery.
Local websites that host bandwidth-hungry content such as audio and video files or have high traffic volumes are increasingly hosting their websites overseas because of favourable costs.
Hosting one of these websites in South Africa can be anywhere between 700% and 1 000% more expensive than hosting the same website internationally.
However, with developers simply moving their websites overseas, it means that revenue that used to remain in South Africa is leaving the country and South Africans are accessing locally produced websites via costly international bandwidth, unnecessarily using up capacity on the SAT-3 undersea cable.
“All this content made for South Africans by South Africans must travel through the SAT-3, using the valuable resource that is the international cable,” said Rudolph Muller from MyADSL.
“The problem with hosting in South Africa is it is extremely expensive for a site with high traffic volumes because of the exorbitant fees for bandwidth,” says Muller. “In South Africa you can get affordable hosting packages but they have severe bandwidth limitations.”
Muller says MyADSL still hosts in South Africa because it is trying to draw attention to issues surrounding exorbitant broadband pricing and by moving overseas, it would be discouraging users to surf the content on its site as it would be accessed via expensive international bandwidth.
Hans Wencke, the CEO of hosting company Hetzner, says local and international hosting costs can be similar but that traffic quotas in South Africa can discourage traffic volumes.
“The international hosting market is increasingly becoming an alternative to local hosting and it will place a burden on international bandwidth that is very expensive,” said Wencke.
Hetzner sells international and local hosting packages and Wencke says a one-gigabyte hosting package in Germany will cost you the equivalent of R12, while a similar hosting package in South Africa will cost about R90.
Muller says there are limited users for bandwidth-hungry content owing to the price, and the result is that South African websites use a lot less audio and video content as well as podcasting on their websites.
“This is because of the cost to the user and the cost to the guys hosting the content,” said Muller.
“Our developers do not have the freedom to develop new services and new skills, and the result is our IT industry becomes internationally uncompetitive,” said Muller.
“There is already a shortage of skills in the ICT sector,” says Wencke. “If people don’t have the opportunity to practise their skills we will fall behind and have to learn from other countries who are already familiar with these technologies.”
Matthew Buckland, the head of marketing for the Online Publishers Association, says it is no secret that South Africa has slipped from its status as an Internet pioneer in the Nineties.
Russel Hanly, chief executive: commercial of 24.com, says there is demand for bandwidth-hungry content such as audio and video to be posted alongside new stories, but there are heavy costs to the publisher for posting bandwidth-intensive content.
“Its about making a decision as to whether it is worth it putting this content up,” said Hanly. “We have made a decision to invest ahead of the broadband curve. We want to be well-versed in the kind of content that works and how to deliver it.”
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A brief search of local and international news websites clearly illustrates South Africa’s lack of adopting multimedia content.
The Independent Online, Mail & Guardian Online and News24 websites had no video or audio content on their home page or linked to their leading stories. International websites, however, are a very different story, with the BBC, CNN and The Washington Post showing a wealth of audio and video content. CNN had four videos among their 10 latest news stories as well as a video section, showing the most popular news videos, which is updated every two hours.
The most popular were the OJ Simpson lap dance video and a video showing destruction in Beirut. On top of this, each news sub-section had its own video content. The BBC website had its own video and audio news section, which included Israeli air strikes in Lebanon and a video about conjoined twins beginning surgery. The Washington Post had a multimedia report on the conflict in Lebanon with news reports, photos and video content, including a video of Hizbullah providing aid to Lebanese victims of the conflict. — Lloyd Gedye