AFRICAN WEBHOST or GODADDY for VPS?

Question

I am working on a high volume project, with majority of the target audience being from Africa.

I have a virtual private server and am already using up over 1tb of bandwidth a month.

My question is I want to migrate from my current host ( GoDaddy ) to an african one, to increase page load time. However I'm not sure if i should do so.

1) My target is the whole of africa and i am not sure if having my server in a african country will necessarily reduce page load time as GoDaddy offers servers on several continents.

2) Are African hosts really reliable ? I want a 99% uptime and good hardware with regular backups without failure. I cant afford any downtime or problems

3) Support.

4) The price tag. I started at GoDaddy with the Economy plan ( $30 / month ) and its quite fair. What are African hosts charging for similar services (   OS: Linux CentOS
RAM: 1 GB
Storage: 40 GB
Restrictions Apply
Bandwidth: 1,000 GB/mo ) In general African hosts overcharge and I dont have to pay more than is necessary.


In general my question is.
 

I have a high volume website designed for the whole of Africa, I am experiencing great growth, I want to improve the general experience for all my visitors who are mostly from Africa. I am currently using a host based in the USA that does not have servers in Africa. Should I switch to an African host , what are the pros and cons and what advice can you give me ( hosts , pricing )

Thanks alot !!!

Answer 1

My advice is to simply switch to an EU based VPS if you want to improve the load time for all your African visitors. It is very doubtiful though that you receive an equal number of hits from across the entire African continent: folks in the Maghreb are unlikely to be interested in stuff from Sub-Saharan Africa and vice-versa. If that is the case it means you can go with a South African webhost. This is likely to be way more expensive when compared to the EU option and the benefits when compared to an EU server are minimal. Unfortunately you have omitted link speed so it would be difficult to do a price comparison.

My advice though is to leave the server where it is and invest in a CDN which has African nodes, your budget permitting.

Comments

CDNs are the reason why Google and FB load as fast as they do nomatter where you are.