4 ms·

It'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 wort

It'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 ago
These news just might have increased the traffic a tad.
13hours 14y ago
I actually hope the development company is stuck with the bandwidth bill. Should at least take a little bit off that ridiculous profit.
- Isofarro 14y ago
  Bandwidth 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 ago
    Any "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 ago
Timed 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 ago
Come 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 ago
What 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 ago
  It'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.

It'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 ago

These news just might have increased the traffic a tad.

13hours 14y ago

I actually hope the development company is stuck with the bandwidth bill. Should at least take a little bit off that ridiculous profit.

Isofarro 14y ago
Bandwidth 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 ago
  Any "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 ago

Timed 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 ago

Come 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 ago

What 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 ago
It'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.