@Peter Well, *for now*, our biggest cost isn't electricity. I'm guessing we can have the six pack and mbuzi on Saturday ;-). Prices will come down. AWS/Google/Digital Ocean are significantly higher capitalised than we are. With capital comes scale (reduced H/W costs, bandwidth costs etc). Let me give another example, if you buy one rack server from Dell, it will cost you roughly 30,000 USD, after discounts (depends on the type, looking at their 4U variety). When buying 10, the price goes down to 24,000 USD thereabouts, if buying 100-10,000 a la Digital Ocean, Amazon etc, the price can be reduced to 15,000. Additionally, with scale comes reduced HR costs (fewer people managing more servers/applications support etc). So these guys can charge less simply because they enough money to reduce their marginal costs. With regards to local hosting, I'd say that you don't only consider the VM cost - we don't charge for transfer (effectively give unlimited local loop connectivity and we still don't have hard caps on international connectivity). When you've got local sites that transfer a few 10 gigs per month, it becomes a significant cost. On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Peter Karunyu <pkarunyu@gmail.com> wrote:
I would bet two six-packs of a drinks that the biggest recurrent cost factor for Angani and Kili is electricity.
@phares and @adam, care to take on my bet?
And @BrianWangila here bets a mbuzi leg
:-)
Oh, and another six-pack for @rsohan
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Brian Wangila <brian@bwangila.com> wrote:
@Peter,
Spot on. Couldn’t have said it better.
On Jul 16, 2014, at 10:39 AM, Peter Karunyu <pkarunyu@gmail.com> wrote:
@Joseph, on your first point, its that exact kind of thinking that will get the CIO @ Nairobi County into trouble with PPOA. How can you justify paying 7k for hosting a website while KES 425 would have provided better value for money, eh?
I agree we should invest in ourselves, but lets do it the proper way, like charging datacenters much less for electricity, or giving them incentives to implement other sources of power, reducing taxes on data center hardware etc, so that they become *globally *competitive, not just locally.
On your third point, my un-proven theory is that the fiber network inside our country gets cut more often than the one in the ocean.
On your fourth point, *patriotically*, it is wrong to host outside. Technically and financially, it is not.
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Joseph M. Owino <jpmuga@tespok.co.ke> wrote:
hi,
There are certain things we need to understand. The title was *County websites being hosted abroad*.
Firstly, I am of the opinion that for a country to succeed it must invest in itself. We cant have a county government quote hundreds of thousands as budget for a website when its some simple wordpress page hosted by Amazon. We all know that all county governments can pay 7k a month to angani or kilio or safaricom but instead its amazon a company worth 354 Billion USD (NSE Total market cap it 25 Billion USD).
Secondly, if this was about latency of course it will not make sense because end users hardly notice anything different.
Thirdly, what happens if e.g. international fiber cuts happen? Will we lose access to online services offered by the Nairobi county government? Do we get delays?
Fourthly, I think its irresponsible for any government website to be hosted abroad its just wrong. (My 2 cents)
regards JP
------------------------------
From: "Brian Wangila" <brian@bwangila.com>
To: "Skunkworks Mailing List" <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 9:27:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Nairobi County Website
@Dennis
For the normal user to notice the difference in latency, you will require a web application that needs to perform lots of near real time queries and load a large number of assets.
If it's the usual website, blog, e-commerce, email, CMSs, then almost no one will notice the latency difference.
I'm willing to bet that if we loaded one site on both servers, all factors constant, and told people in this thread to pick the "faster one", ie the locally hosted one, most of us wouldn't tell the difference.
__ Kind regards,
Brian Wangila Web developer | UI Designer Lead Developer - Skyline Design Ltd
From: Dennis Kioko Sent: 7/16/2014 9:17 AM To: Skunkworks Mailing List Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Nairobi County Website
We are assuming that these are simple websites, while over time we are looking at email systems, payment systems for some counties and more.
It stops being just an email system. _______________________________________________ skunkworks mailing list skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke ------------ List info, subscribe/unsubscribe http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------
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