Product News
Afrihost Dedicate Themselves to Cloud Hosting
Thursday, 09 May, 2013 at 11:00 - Product News
Advocates of traditional dedicated and rack hosting in South Africa have claimed that Cloud Hosting cannot deliver the same level of performance. Unfortunately, the rest of world disagrees and we intend to fight the stigma by beefing up our Cloud Hosting services, as international hosting trends move towards more advanced Cloud Solutions.
In simple terms, conventional dedicated hosting may have fixed access to resources, but cloud infrastructure makes additional resources instantly available to dedicated hosting clients. Cloud products are far more flexible and scalable, with minimal downtime (if any) during upgrades or changes. As more infrastructure is added (cloud blades), the total processing power is increased, for the potential benefit of all hosted servers.
Our Cloud infrastructure also makes dynamic use of three storage options: Solid State (SSD), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). The Cloud controller dynamically manages file storage on servers according to the amount of requests to ensure that popular content is more quickly and easily accessible.
Cloud hosting also has better backup features and vastly improved redundancy over its conventional dedicated predecessor. New cloud servers can be deployed in less than an hour, while physical servers can take up to 48 hours to be configured and physically connected to data centre infrastructure.
Using the cloud's blade infrastructure, hardware failures can immediately be mitigated by failing over to other blades (which are also easily replaced) - while physical server failure requires the physical replacement and possible reconfiguration of components, resulting in unnecessary downtime.
In line with our future vision for hosting, we will be offering a more expansive range of Dedicated Cloud solutions, as well as revising our current offerings to cater for a wider range of options from personal to corporate requirements. Our brand new Enterprise-Grade Cloud products offer superior technical specs to current physical dedicated packages - at a fraction of the cost.
We will also be sweetening the deal by slashing excess web traffic and disk space charges on Cloud Hosting packages. Additional Web Traffic usage will now cost only R3.50 per GB*, reduced by 50% from the current rate of R7 per GB while Excess Disk space will be cut by 64% from R2.50 per GB to 90 cents per GB, bringing our rates well within international standards.
As an additional benefit to existing Cloud Hosting clients, current Gold and Platinum Cloud clients will be upgraded to Enterprise Cloud Bronze and Gold respectively to enjoy more resources and better performance, while still saving R100 per month! We will also be dropping their Management fee for both regular and enterprise cloud hosting from R1,000pm to R500pm.
| Old Cloud | Bronze | Silver | Gold | Platinum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | R290pm | R490pm | R990pm | R1490pm |
| Web Traffic | 50GB | 75GB | 100GB | 200GB |
| HDD | 100GB | 200GB | 320GB | 500GB |
| vCPUs | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 |
| RAM | 4GB | 6GB | 12Gb | 16GB |
| New Cloud | Bronze | Silver | Gold | Platinum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | R290pm | R490pm | R590pm | R790pm |
| Web Traffic | 50GB | 250GB | 300GB | 500GB |
| HDD | 100GB | 200GB | 320GB | 500GB |
| vCPUs | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| RAM | 2GB | 4GB | 6GB | 8GB |
| Enterprise Cloud | Bronze | Silver | Gold | Platinum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | R890pm | R1090pm | R1390pm | R1990pm |
| Web Traffic | 750GB | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB |
| HDD | 2TB | 3TB | 4TB | 8TB |
| vCPUs | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 |
| RAM | 12GB | 16GB | 24GB | 32GB |
*(for new and existing clients who are hosted at MTN data centres)
Click here for more information and technical overviews of our Cloud products.
Afrihost Makes Sharing Easy!
Tuesday, 07 May, 2013 at 10:37 - Product News
Who says that sharing has to mean getting less? We believe that it's much easier to share web hosting when there's plenty of resources for everyone. With that in mind, we've Introduced Unlimited Web Traffic on Shared Hosting!
As of 1st May, we have completely removed excess bandwidth charges on all our Shared Hosting products. This means that clients will no longer be charged a per GB fee when their bandwidth usage exceeds the package limit, effectively removing all web traffic limits on Shared Hosting products. For existing clients, all excess usage after the 1st May will be zero-rated.
We are extremely confident that this will make our Shared Hosting offering an extremely attractive option to SA Web Hosting clients, while saving many of our existing clients a little extra on their monthly fees. After all, sharing is caring.
Afrihost Doubles Down!
Monday, 15 April, 2013 at 15:29 - Product News
We have long been known as a market leader when it comes to bandwidth pricing. From introducing ADSL data at R29 per GB back in 2009, to our recent aggressive bundle pricing on Consumer and Business Uncapped Bundles - all eyes are on us, and with good reason!
Despite offering the cheapest monthly ADSL product on the market at R0.00 for 1GB, we will now be giving our paid Capped DSL clients DOUBLE the amount of bandwidth for the same amount of money, effectively slashing our prices by 50%! We will be adding 100% more data to ALL our paid Capped DSL clients' accounts. So a client who currently pays for R29 for 2GB, for example, will get a second 2GB added onto their account each month at no extra charge. We will also continue to honour and offer a FREE GB on all capped accounts (which can be activated in ClientZone). This means that a client paying R29 for 2GB will actually receive 5GB in total each month for the duration of the promotion.
Capped clients will now be paying from as little as R4 per GB on higher packages, the lowest per GB price on the SA broadband market. New clients can sign up for the packages from today, and existing clients will receive the additional data as of 1st May.
The offer will run until the end of July 2013 at which point it will be revised or extended.
For more information on Afrihost's Capped DSL promotion, click here.
ADSL Network Upgrades - Update
Tuesday, 22 January, 2013 at 11:54 - Product News
We'd like to make all our valued ADSL clients aware of the progress of our anticipated ADSL Network Upgrades.
We are due to install new IPC's in Cape Town and in Durban. Telkom have committed that this additional capacity will be installed by no later the 25th February 2013. Until the new IPC is live, we will also be revising our QoS system to give the best overall experience, particularly with regard to HTTP downloads, to allow for higher priority for these vital services.
Our national network infrastructure upgrades are almost complete. The JHB-CPT link has been upgraded to a 10Gbps fibre link, and the JHB-DBN link is due to be completed soon. The additional international capacity on EASSy has been provisioned and should be live within the week.
We will be looking at every available solution to deliver the best possible service, and to alleviate any issues experienced by Uncapped users, until the additional IPC goes live. We will inform all of our clients of any new developments, or as we achieve each milestone in the process.
For more information on how we're upgrading our network, please click here.
Afrihost Delivers Your First Treat of 2013 - The MyBandwidth Widget
Friday, 04 January, 2013 at 13:16 - Product News
2013 promises to be an awesome year for Afrihost clients, and we are truly excited about all the upgrades and improvements we have planned. To usher in the new year, we've added a brand new gadget to our family of online self management tools, like ClientZone and our iOS and Android Mobile Apps. Introducing the MyBandwidth OS X Desktop Widget.
The MyBandwidth Widget is the perfect way for Apple Mac users to stay in complete control of their ADSL products. You can quickly and easily monitor your bandwidth usage for all the ADSL accounts on your profile. If you have multiple ClientZone profiles, simply add another widget - you can have as many as you like. With quick links to Top Up your ADSL or access Afrihost Support, it's everything you need keep the Pure Internet Joy flowing!
Click here to read more about the MyBandwidth widget and download it! Give it a try and tell us what you think!
