Roughly a year after unveiling its uncapped ADSL offering, MWeb today announced its uncapped hosting product.
The Internet service provider's (ISP's) hosting product will cost R19 a month and it says it has included all elements needed for a Web site in the package.
“Uncapped hosting will allow South Africans to put their business on the map with all the essential features in a secured shared hosting space,” says MWeb.
It says the fixed rate hosting bundle includes no limit to the amount of traffic to a consumer's Web site, which means they will incur no additional charges, and will have uncapped storage space. “If the site becomes popular there is no need to pay for extra traffic or storage.
“There is also a free .co.za domain name and a personalised e-mail address with five additional aliases. MWeb provisions the Web site, registers it for its customers and renews their domain on an annual basis.”
It adds that the Web sites will be locally hosted at MWeb's South African data centres, allowing Web sites to download faster for local visitors.
“MWeb ADSL customers will get MWeb uncapped hosting for free for the first year,” says GM of MWeb Connect Carolyn Holgate.
Local hosting
WWW Strategy MD Steven Ambrose says this is a competitive offering. He adds that the offering is a smart, logical move. “After bedding down its uncapped access services, it has moved to the next level in the chain and that is Web hosting.”
He adds that many South African sites are hosted offshore, simply due to the low cost and simplicity. “Local hosting has always been expensive, and often the process of setting up a local hosting service has been somewhat convoluted and slow. The bandwidth caps and usage limits were also very low compared to hosting in the US and Germany.”
It got to the point where local companies were offering hosting services based on providers outside of SA, says Ambrose.
“The timing of MWeb in launching this service locally will ride the wave of accelerated growth in Internet usage in SA, and assist in facilitating more and more businesses to go online at a reasonable cost.”
Service improvement
Ambrose also says the initiative will encourage local users to use a local hosting company, which should offer time zone support benefits, as well as enhanced service and support.
MWeb fared poorly in a recent independent test comparing uncapped ADSL offerings from several local ISPs in terms of service.
The company did not win a single one of the 11 different test categories, and was at the bottom in four.
Responding to the outcome of the test, MWeb product manager Rihana Hoosain said an internal investigation had been started.
Share