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South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site
- buyx 14y agoThe website in question: http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/ http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/
- jameswyse 14y agoIt's ridiculously slow for me. The site has been loading for 1.4 minutes and I've only received 146KB so far and there's still nothing on the screen. Well worth the price..
- pgsandstrom 14y agoThese news just might have increased the traffic a tad.
- 13hours 14y agoI actually hope the development company is stuck with the bandwidth bill. Should at least take a little bit off that ridiculous profit.
- Isofarro 14y agoBandwidth in South Africa is quite expensive (see http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/vps-co-za-a-lowendbox-in-south-africa/ http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/vps-co-za-a-lowendbox-in-south... for a range estimate). I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable chunk of the cost is estimates for bandwidth charges based on a serious over estimation of unique visitors. And perhaps a rounded up premium on the base price of each gig of bandwidth
- oskarpearson 14y agoAny "bandwidth cost" being a key part of the cost is likely a red herring. It appears the IP address of the host (163.195.16.73) is owned by the SA government, so they are likely paying for bandwidth, not the contractor that developed the site. In my opinion this probably means bandwidth isn't part of the quoted cost. See http://www.afrinic.net http://www.afrinic.net and a DNS lookup for http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/ http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/ - which is a CNAME for iproxy1.openet.gov.za. Of course I've not seen any contracts here or similar, so I could be wrong, but it's certainly how I'd expect the contract to be managed. Regarding high bandwidth costs, the SA government has a significant stake in the monopoly telco provider (Telkom SA - http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-corporate-governance/pic-calls-governance-change-at-telkom http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-corporate-governance/pic-... says it's 39.8% government owned). My opinion is that bandwidth costs are high in SA because of the monopoly. There are some references/articles about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_(South_Africa)#Criticisms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_(South_Africa)#Criticism... So even if the costs are high, it doesn't really matter to the Government - they are getting 39.8% of the costs back from their other investments - it's just the rest of the technology sector that suffers. Oskar
- jacques_chester 14y ago> It's ridiculously slow for me. Installing WP Supercache is an extra R40,000,000.
- andypants 14y agoTimed out for me. > Your cache administrator is webmaster. With a link to "mailto: webmaster". They don't even know how to use email addresses apparently.
- merinid 14y agoCome on... these people never expected web scale nor should they have paid/designed/engineered for it (that said for the price they paid my comment is rather f*ing sarcastic)
- kawsper 14y agoWhat are you basing that on? Your placement to the servers? A lot of american websites hosted decent places (Bluebox comes to mind) is also slow from European connections. You need to calculate your location to the servers if you want to know if something is slow or not.
- taejo 14y agoIt's slow from South Africa, too. Source: I'm here. OTOH, it was fine this morning -- it's clearly suffering from HN/Reddit effect/Slashdot effect.
- instakill 14y agoThe real figure is R40m.
- Q_the_Novice 14y agoI'm from South Africa and this simply demonstrates the extent of corruption within our government departments. It is not uncommon for government departments to inflate tender budgets so as to benefit from kickbacks. I'm appalled by such such acts, firstly as a South African citizen and secondly as a hard working web developer.
- 13hours 14y agoIt's ridiculous that even with this type of thing happening openly, no opposition party can beat the ruling ANC. We can just hope Ramphele's Agang party will know how to use this type of thing against them.
- yen223 14y agoThis sort of blatant corruption is not uncommon, unfortunately. 2 years back my home country's government spent about $600,000 on Facebook pages: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/tourism-ministry-rm1.8-million-spent-on-facebook-pages http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/tourism-...
- Q_the_Novice 14y agoIt gets even better, the company that designed the website doesn't even have its own website: http://letlaka.co.za/ http://letlaka.co.za/.
- yen223 14y agoCan you blame them? Have you seen how much websites cost?
- nsoonhui 14y agoMalaysian here! So glad you bring this up!!
- ptbello 14y agoAnd yet, this sounds amateurish compared to the exact same scandal in Italy, but on a national scale: the "official" tourism portal: http://www.italia.it/en/home.html http://www.italia.it/en/home.html. It had been calculated that direct and indirect costs of the project summed up to about 140M€ over the years. At the time, someone put up a dedicated blog on the subject: http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/ http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/ The WSJ was on it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121969807244970447.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121969807244970447.html It even won a wikipedia entry: http://translate.google.it/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italia.it http://translate.google.it/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=h...
- mercurial 14y ago"Ntsele told the newspaper opposition parties had an agenda against black businessmen and that the website’s cost was fair." Yeah, right...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- infoman 14y ago~$12,999,987.00 margin on this one
- angry-hacker 14y agoThe theme being used called "London Live" is for sale here: http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine-and-blog/154462 http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine... Costs 40 dollars.
- datashaman 14y agoBroken by the high traffic, no doubt. Guess they're gonna be hitting the coffers for load testing soon...
- EA 14y agoThat's what they get for using Dreamhost.
- CurtMonash 14y agoI can't see this wonder, because it gives me a Connection Refused error. :)
- gingerlime 14y agoIt does seem totally ridiculous, but I think in many cases governments bring these things on themselves with highly complicated tender processes and red-tape (many time in the name of due-process, fairness and transparency) Imagine putting a bid for this work. Do you think most of the effort is in building the website itself, or dealing with so many bureaucrats, forms, approvals and so on? Making sure your developers have X certification and your office is compliant with Y regulation, and that all your processes are ISO certified and so on... This stuff costs money, and quite a lot. So any sane company who wishes to enter into business with any government organization usually take these substantial extra costs into account, which ends up inflating the price. The sad thing of course is that it's the citizens who end up footing the bill. EDIT to clarify: I am not trying to say that the price makes sense in this particular case. I'm talking more about the general problem with govt-related contracts.
- buyx 14y agoEven if there was a requirement for certifications etc (which I seriously doubt), it would not have inflated the price to this extent, especially considering that other companies submitted much cheaper bids.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- anu_gupta 14y agoIt's fairly clear that this has very little do do with process and bureaucracy and everything to do with corruption. Looks to me like the price has been inflated by 2 - 3 orders of magnitude, possibly 4. This isn't adding a margin to cope with certification.
- datashaman 14y agoIf your company is not certified to these standards, then you should not be eligible to tender.
- lusr 14y agoLet's dig into these numbers. Assuming the R40m value is correct over 3 years, then: - since there are 248 working days in a South African year on average, the average daily cost ran to ~R53,763 or ~R6,720 per hour - at the banks I've worked at, that'll buy you 10 intermediate on-site contract developers, or 6 senior developers, from an average consulting house which factors in all of these overhead expenses (including travel, etc.) you mention... and that's doing skilled development; this is WordPress work, but let's be generous and say they bill the same It's hard to believe they required anywhere near that many developers (designers are much cheaper and I can't imagine they hired more than 1 or 2), or that hardware/service contracts would have cost much more.
- Shtirlic 14y agoIn Russia this website would cost at least $30m.
- gesman 14y agoJust a normal money laundering process with prearranged kickbacks.
- skiba 14y agoi live in south africa. i'm pretty ashamed to see this on the main page of hacker news. as is made pretty clear in the linked article, over one hundred million rand was most likely embezzled. what angers me the most is how they can simply get away with it by just waiting for it to 'blow over'... -.-
- friendly_chap 14y agoThis is exactly the kind of corruption which goes on in my country (Hungary). I hereby want to ask every HNer if he wants to team up with me and create a nonprofit startup which lets people document corruption in their country/city etc, things which are too small for wikileaks, or publicity like this.
- admp 14y agoCheck out http://bribespot.com/ http://bribespot.com/ -- they are doing pretty much the same thing.
- friendly_chap 14y agoI will look into it, thanks for the heads up.
- ollybee 14y agoalso http://www.ipaidabribe.com/ http://www.ipaidabribe.com/
- diego_moita 14y agoI don't know about Hungary but in 3rd world countries (I am Brazilian) the worst is not that these things happen, it is that voters are too stupid to care. One example: a couple years ago it was discovered that the president of the Brazilian Senate and Congress had a child with a mistress and a lobbyist office was paying the child support. It was a scandal that made big news. He resigned from the presidency but remained in the Senate. Later on he was reelected as senator and chosen president of senate again, last month. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renan_Calheiros http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renan_Calheiros
- mercurial 14y agoWell, that's pretty much Berlusconi's entire political career: 20 years of scandals and still going strong. At the same time, you can expect at least one scandal per French president, but we seem to change them with more regularity.
- nicholassmith 14y agoSo it's running an exploited version of WordPress and suddenly has a significant amount of people looking at it? This always ends well. Good money if you can get it though, $15.4m for knocking something out in a few days and job is done. Sit back and order some mojitos.
- capitalisthakr 14y agoI was involved in a project for the SA Government portal back in ...the late 2000's.... and I remember how much bullshit we had to put up with to get the contract. At the end of a year and a half of developing a highly custom CMS system for them to manage the portal they canned the project (and the few million ZAR of taxpayer money they'd payed us) only to contract in some small black owned company to develop something. I suspect this is linked. I need to meet this Tumi Ntsele person. She's a friggin' genius.
- janlukacs 14y agoSame thing happened in Romania with a lot of govt. websites. The worst thing is they are usually unusable crap... costing millions of taxpayers money.
- RyanZAG 14y agoThe causes behind this are truly more systemic than mere corruption, and actually pull at the very root of problems in Africa and many developing economies in the current tech environment. In USA/Europe/increasing in China and India, basic tech and internet projects are fairly well understood by the general public. The idea of wordpress, blogs, and even a basic understanding of the internet and modern technology are fairly prevalent. Even with corruption in a small Texan town, something like pushing through a Wordpress site for $15m would be impossible - there is an understanding of how a website is created and what constitutes a million dollar vs a thousand dollar technology project. I live in South Africa, so I see this every day: there is zero understanding by the majority of the population into any internet related projects. Our major new tech companies tend to boost up the Johannesburg Stock Exchange into incredible valuations before suddenly realizing that their business models are terrible. Most entrepreneurship in the country is focused on targeting townships - people who can barely afford to eat, let alone think about technology, and unsurprisingly, these companies turn to government grants or dissolve. These are all systemic problems from countries simply not being able to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technological developments - and I think it's going to be a massive problem in the future for any country not focusing on getting into the 'internet rush'. It should be clear to most of us on HN just how important these kind of tech innovations are going to be on the future of humanity.
- jbail 14y agoI've seen many millions of dollars spent on websites, logos, and webpage designs in the United States over the past decade. In many cases, there was clearly A LOT of profit built into the price. $15 million is no doubt a lot for a Wordpress site. But, I've seen $6 million spent on a logo. Is that more or less ridiculous?
- ajross 14y agoSurely it's no less ridiculous. But, to step on some touchy ground here... The executives who approved the logo were very well-compensated tech industry leaders. And if they made a dumb decision then they deserved the finacial pain and community scorn they deserved. Shame on them. But the folks who paid for the blog were mid-level government officials in a comparatively impoverished nation with little local tech leadership or expertise to draw on. They got duped. Our moral compass wants to draw different conclusions here. Which is the truth? Damned if I know.
- festaans 14y agoFound the theme used on the site http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/ http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/
- _sentient 14y agoThis is the supposed web developer's website: http://www.cherryonline.co http://www.cherryonline.co
- Havoc 14y agoRegistered with a South African ISP, but a Colombian top level domain. ( .co.za is South African). Real pros at work...
- notjustanymike 14y agoFor a $15 million site you think they'd compress their CSS and javascript.
- noarchy 14y agoThey didn't do much customization at all. They used an already-existing Wordpress theme. Compare the site to the theme: http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/ http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/
- asimjalis 14y agoThis is similar to the story a few days ago about West Virginia spending $5 million on Cisco routers it did not need. In general government tend to be overcharged. This is not unique to Africa. Also some of the cost is justified. Getting government contracts requires paperwork and meeting conditions that add to the cost of the contract. Also government payment cycles are different. So the contractor has to build in some margin for delayed payments. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5283160 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5283160
- boh 14y agoThe Wordpress theme they used to make the website: http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine-and-blog/full_screen_preview/154462 http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine... $40 on Theme Forest
- Aloisius 14y agoSometimes I feel like starting a consultancy that prepares fair price quotes for technology implementations for governments, but doesn't actually do them so there is no conflict of interest. That way governments can pay $1000 upfront to see if the bids they are getting are over or under.
- ttyrq 14y agoMan.... how do I get in on this racket?
- offordscott 14y agoWithout seeing the proposal or statement of work from the website developer, I'm not going to comment on whether this is an outrage or not.
- jenntoda 14y agoAnd the site is down. Ops.