We aboslutely love doing what we do but we are faced with a major catch-22 in that hosting QuickShare in South Africa has become prohibitively expensive. This is because the cost of bandwidth is easily 600 times more expensive in South Africa than what it is in the USA or Europe. For the price of 1MB here we can get 683MB on a popular hosting service based in the UK.

Since our users are the most valuable part of QuickShare, we decided to share our thoughts with you and get your opinions and thoughts on the situation.

After giving it some thought, it seems we have 2 viable solutions.

Solution 1

• We continue to host QuickShare in South Africa, limit the amount of bandwidth available on the free account and introduce paid accounts for users who require more bandwidth.

The pros:
Users will still be able to sample the service and use it for hosting and sharing of small files. Users will be able to access files on local-only bandwidth and will be also enjoy the faster speeds associated with hosting a site locally.

The cons
Due to the costs of bandwidth mentioned above, the cost of the paid plans will be quite high even though we would be able to secure bandwidth at fraction over cost price.

Solution 2

• We move QuickShare over to an international server in order to reduce bandwidth and hosting costs.

The pros
Cheaper bandwidth and hosting costs would mean that we could operate as usual but offer our users a significantly more powerful free account and users accessing files from other countries would experience better speeds than they currently do.

The cons
International hosting would bring slightly reduced speeds to local users due to the higher latency between South Africa and the rest of the world. Users would also no longer be able to access QuickShare on local-only bandwidth.

Comments are open on this post and you do not need to be registered on the blog to post. We would appreciate your thoughts and feedback regarding this situation.

Kind regards,
QuickShare Team