what is the difference in speed between hosting a zim site in rsa and uk or its virtually the same?

Question

Is there a difference in speed between hosting a Zimbabwean website  in South Africa  and UK or its virtually the same

Answer 1

If you visitors are primarily in Zimbabwe, hosting in Zimbabwe is the best. The next best is whatever closest country to Zimbabwe there is, but only if there's a direct internet link between those countries, and Zimbabwe and SA have direct internet links.

Ultimately, the lesser internet hops (Different stops that you requests and files make before they reach a site and back to the user's phone (or computer)) the traffic makes, the faster the speed. UK is therefore slower than South Africa, but it is generally faster than the US as most of our traffic in Zimbabwe goes through Europe before it reaches the US.

Answer 2

Ultimately it depends just as much on the provider as it does the location

generally the rule of thumb is get the server as close to your audience as possible that said, the wrong server (overloaded or on a poor internet link) can be worse than a higher quality server in a further away country

all things being Equal SA would be better for hosting than UK, that said this is dependant on the route the traffic takes to get there, for example powertel traffic will likely go via botswana to the undersea cable and hopefully down to SA (if not then via the UK and back), Telone will do a similar route but via mozambique, Liquid/ZOL will both go direct to JHB and hopefully hit from there direct but again worst case is to UK and back again

UK is often a good safety net as 90% of all internet access internationally from ZW will generally pass through UK at somepoint