Web Africa, currently South Africa’s 2^nd biggest hosting provider, has just launched their new range of hosting products – Nitro Unlimited.

Web Africa has just released their new Nitro Unlimited hosting range that promises to be a highly competitive product in the local hosting space by giving clients access to unlimited bandwidth and a fully equipped control panel that makes managing your website and email accounts a breeze.

The new Nitro Unlimited hosting range gives clients the choice of a Linux or Windows hosting environment with the option of hosting locally in South Africa or internationally at no additional charge.

Head of Product and Marketing, Cliff Hazell had this to say about their new offering: “We’re bringing leading international standards home, and giving South Africans the exceptional value and experience they deserve.”

Web Africa’s Nitro Unlimited hosting range starts from as low as R19pm and have a 30 day money back guarantee should you not be satisfied with the product.

Nitro Unlimited Hosting Packages Breakdown

MWEB the company that stunned the local ADSL market exactly a year ago by offering South Africans cheap uncapped ADSL is at it again and this time they are taking on expensive hosting prices.

Hosting your site locally could set you back quite a few bucks, and thus many people running sites has opted to rather host internationally than locally, but MWEB is again changing the landscape of the local Internet space.

MWEB has just announced their new uncapped local hosting offering, bringing local hosting prices in line with that of international ones. The new MWEB Uncapped Hosting will allow users to host their sites locally without any bandwidth or storage restrictions from as little as R19 per month.

The new local uncapped hosting offering is aimed at small businesses and individuals and includes a free “co.za” domain which will automatically renew every year, plus a free email address with up to 5 aliases and will operate on a shared hosting environment.

It has to be noted that although the service is uncapped there is a acceptable usage policy in place to prevent users from setting up media farms where they can download movies and share it amongst others.

Good news for MWEB ADSL subscribers is that they may make use of the Uncapped Hosting package free of charge for the first 12 months, after which the R19/month fee may apply, this excludes 1GB customers.

I for one am happy to see this change in the local hosting space as it was long overdue, now its just a matter of time before other hosting providers like WebAfrica, Afrihost and RSAWEB respond to this and we will see the whole ADSL price war all over again but this time for hosting.

When it comes to hosting your site everybody always say host it locally, but despite Internet becoming more and more affordable in South Africa hosting your site locally still cost you an arm and a leg.

But why host it local? Hosting locally has some advantages like faster loading time and better reliability for local visitors. Now there are numerous types of local hosting packages available but for now I will focus on dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting is when you are in complete control of the server, you decide what operating system to run, what software etc. Dedicated hosting is ideal if you are serving large amounts of data a month and require lots of processing power.

Here is a list of the leading hosting companies in South Africa offering dedicated hosting and how much you can expect to pay.

Once again MWEB is leading the race for affordable hosting like they did with affordable ADSL in South Africa. However it is still shocking to see just how expensive hosting in South Africa are, specially if you are looking at dedicated servers.

What hosting package are you using? Tell me in the comments, would love to hear.

By now every body have heard of, or signed up to the limited R29 per GB ADSL offer from Afrihost.

This offer by Afrihost, known for its hosting, has set the wheel rolling to drive broadband prices down in South Africa. Although Afrihost is only offering it as a limited promotion, if you sign up during the promotion you will always be charged R29 per GB for as long as you are a customer.

Now Afrihost has again disrupted the local internet market by slashing their price by another 50% if you top up. If you are a Afrihost customer you can now top up at R14.50 per GB. This is the cheapest per GB price for international bandwidth South Africa has ever seen, it even comes close to what other ISP charge for 1 GB local only bandwidth.

If you haven’t by now signed up to the cheapest ADSL in South Africa, what are you waiting for? Sign up here for cheap international ADSL bandwidth, or if you are looking to host a website why not visit Afrhost site to sign up for one of their great hosting packages.

PS. I dropped my long time ISP WebAfrica and switched over to Afrihost about 2 month ago and haven’t looked back since, saving me a total of 50% on my 5GB cap at home.

A few month back I decided it’s time to go more global with domain names and started looking for a suitable .com domain name.

I went on search without knowing what I wanted to do with the domain name, but as soon as I discovered the domain CapeTownVibe.com I just knew I had to register it. I registered through WebAfrica my ISP of choice and was lucky enough to discover they are running a special for only R90 for a dot com domain. Registration was quick and painless, five minutes after requesting the registration, the domain was registered and active.

I’m still contemplating what I want to do with the domain, I was thinking something along the lines of a guide to Cape Town with whats happening in and around the city aswell as maybe some accommodation info. What do you guys think?

The Garden Route’s first fully serviced Data Center will be constructed and opened at Office Reliance in George during 2009!

This high tech facility will offer 24 x 7 operations, will make use of state of the art equipment and technology, and will offer fully redundant services. It will be capable of supplying localized services to the Garden Route, but will also offer outsourced services to national and international customers.

The Data Center will include the following core services:

• Hosting Center – hosting of shared servers, dedicated servers as well as virtual servers.The hosting centre will have fully redundant connectivity and power systems.

• Call Center – the call center will operate 24 x 7 and will service clients around the globe. Inbound as well as outbound calls will be accommodated, with highly configurable and customizable call handling.

• Business Process Outsourcing Center -The Data Center will be fully staffed and equipped to deal with all BPO requirements. Software testing and QA will be the first BPO project.

• Software Development Center – Dedicated software professionals will be on hand, dealing with specialized and customized software developments. A large government database development project is the first to go through the development center.

For more details on this ground breaking development please contact Imel at imel@officereliance.co.za

Yesterday afternoon I decided to install a nifty plugin called Flagfox, this plugin displays a flag next to the url corresponding to the country the site is hosted in. So this morning while having my first cup of coffee and browsing my normal blogs like iMod and 2Oceansvibe I noticed that non of these site are actualy hosted in South Africa.

This made me think, what classifies a site as a local site? Is it simply the co.za domain? Or perhaps the fact that the author lives in South Africa? Maybe its because the content is only geared towards local people.

For me what makes a site local is a combination of almost all of the factors above. Personaly the 1st thing I look at when classifying a website as local is checking where it is hosted, and then obviously the content.

This brings me to the local blog aggregators Afrigator and Amatomu, how do they specify if a blog is South African? Do they actualy check if site is relevant to South Africa or is it up to the author of the blog to decide whetere his site is local? As previously stated for me for a site to be a local site it needs to be hosted localaly and content must be relevant to South Africa, the first can be debatable on if the content is realy relevant to South Africa. Now take Carblog as an example, I could be wrong but just a quick visit to the blog released nothing realy local to me, just posts about cars being released with price tags in pounds. Now is this a local site cause it has a co.za domain or because the author resides localy as the content is not realy relevent to South Africa and the site is hosted in USA.

Sure everybody has their own views of what makes a site local and I would like to have your views on this, as 8 out of the top ten 10 South Africa blogs on Amatomu (Afrigator was down at the time I wrote this) are not hosted localy and some of them has content not relevant to South Africa.

Please give me your views on what you think makes a site local.