Hosting a site in SA set to get cheaper, faster

Internet service provider (ISP) RSA Web is claiming an African first with its Content Delivery Network (CDN) offering.

If you’re wondering what a CCDN is, the company’s MD Mark Slingsby does a fairly good job of explaining it:

Essentially, a CDN is a content delivery system built in the Cloud, we help your website load fast all across the world, by placing the heavy, data munching and server crushing content like images, CSS, HTML and video into our server network, each time a user visits your site, we serve them this content from the server geographically closest to them. This shaves time off your sites load time, thus increasing your sites conversion rate and can even improve your sites Google ranking.

Slingsby reckons that all of this means “CDNs can typically slice up to 30% – 50% off the costs of hosting for websites”.

His fellow Rob Gilmour admits that the company may have something of challenge on its hands convincing websites in the country that they need a CDB: “although we are proud to be the first African CDN supplier, we realise that we have some way to go in educating the market as to what CDN is its capabilities.”

That’s good news for sites that can’t use US-based CDN products the likes Amazon or Max CDN.