[kictanet] Local Content: Cost of Local Hosting

[wesley kirinya]

Bandwidth costs seem to be coming down and that's welcome news. However an important area seems to be largely ignored and that's the cost of hosting locally.

A Dedicated server in the U.S/Europe (8 Core Processor, 6GB RAM, 3,000GB Bandwidth, 500GB disk space, ...) costs about $500/month. I believe in Kenya that would cost about 8-10 times more and that's without the 3,000GB bandwidth. With bandwidth becoming cheaper and better quality, it's far cheaper to host the local content internationally, and end-users might not feel a big difference in speed and quality.

Factors leading to high hosting cost might be cost of physical space and electricity (highly priced and unstable). If these are the major reasons why hosting costs are high, then we cannot expect the cost to come down any sooner no matter how many fibres are coming to Kenya. 

Local companies (e.g. BPOs dealing with large volumes of data) and local branches of international companies looking for secure off-site back up might also do it from internationally located servers, where the companies running those servers not only offer lower cost but also more experience which leads to better service. As one of such companies puts it ,"98% of replies within 30 mintues, 99.9% Network Uptime Guarantee, ...".

Therefore we are looking at a situation where local content might be hosted internationally.

8~!

 


      
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