Local site?

[Sparks]

Hi, firstly thanks for a great site. It is most enlightening yet, at the same time, enjoyable, with no shortage of humour throughout the ernst.
I have just maxed my 9Gig International cap and have discovered that TheForumSA.co.za does not load. Surely the site should be pro South Africa, considering that it is directed at South Africans, and be hosted locally?
Please enlighten me further.
Thanks.

[AndyD]

There was an old thread kicking around somewhere which was about the hosting problems and page load times on a local za server and the resulting change over to and international one.

[SilverNodashi]

There was an old thread kicking around somewhere which was about the hosting problems and page load times on a local za server and the resulting change over to and international one.

Andy, I might have missed that post. Local bandwidth has come down quite a lot, but load issues on a server sounds like a over-loaded server, which you can get anywhere. Generally a busy forum to like this would need a VPS (don't use Virtuzzo / OpenVA) to start with and then later upgrade to a dedicated server.

[Dave A]

The full hosting history of TFSA is quite a long story. However, in short:
At first moving the hosting offshore was an issue of cost. As SoftDux points out, a site of this size and type does chew resources and the cost gap between local and offshore hosting is a gulf. Bottom line - Hosting offshore was financially viable for a forum site financed entirely out of Adsense, but was not financially viable on local hosting.

That gap has narrowed recently, but just as I was seriously looking at bringing the hosting "back home", out came a few pieces of local legislation and bills that has me thinking that it might be a good idea to keep hosting out of local government's legislative reach.

The peering agreement problems between local ISP's last year didn't help the "bring it home" cause either.

At the moment I'm watching a number of developments - the Wikileaks saga, the local gag bills being considered, and the expansion of international connectivity - all of which affect just where TFSA should be hosted.

[Sparks]

Thanks Dave, that was what I suspected, now I know.