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..
Well worth the price..
Installing WP Supercache is an extra R40,000,000.
> Your cache administrator is webmaster.
With a link to "mailto: webmaster". They don't even know how to use email addresses apparently.
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.
OTOH, it was fine this morning -- it's clearly suffering from HN/Reddit effect/Slashdot effect.
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 and a DNS lookup for 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-... 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)#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