Google.co.za not locally hosted? (in South Africa)

Google.co.za not locally hosted? (in South Africa)

1 Comment 25 March 2006

Our Wireless ISP (Internet Serice Provider) seems to be experiencing some international bandwidth problems today. ‘Thank goodness there is a Google South Africa,’ I think.

Firefox greets me with the following message:

The connection has timed out
The server at www.googe.co.za is taking too long to respond.
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

I suppose Google South Africa is not hosted locally either Well there is always Opera Mini.

Have you read these yet?

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Rafiq Phillips

Rafiq Phillips - who has written 1261 posts on Web AddiCT(s);.

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http://charlvn.za.net/ Charl van Niekerk
The first time I got redirected to the google.co.za domain I wondered about this exact same thing and immediately did a traceroute – yes it goes all the way to the states.
In a way this does make sense; a search engine of Google’s scale needs massive amounts of computing power and storage space. South Africa only makes up an “insignificant” portion of the total traffic Google is getting; it would not make economical sense to have a full mirror cluster here.
Most smaller countries just get directed somewhere else, but they do have a few massive server clusters in some places outside America – I think they might have in Europe, India and/or China. But I’m not exactly sure.