For those of you who have been following the Locally Hosted thought thread where Your Web AddiCT has been discussing the hight cost of web hosting bandwith in South Africa, the story continues.
Due to the high bandwidth cost of tier 1 providers in South Africa it is not possible for us to subsidise or reduce the traffic charges on the hosting of your site. We are aware of the the high cost (relative to international standards) domain owners have to deal with. We have therefore made an alternative arrangement available by offering hosting accounts at our German hosting facility at the same price and level of service but with  considerable more traffic allocated to your domain. As bandwidth is much cheaper in Europe, we pass these savings onto you and are therfore able to increase the traffic quotas on domains hosted in Germany.
The servers in Germany are maintained by our staff in South Africa in colaboration with Hetzner Online in Germany. Any support queries will still be dealt with via the South African support centre.
You are welcome to request a trial site. We can then assign you a test account on one of the German server which you can try free of charge.
Please feel free to contact us should you wish to discuss this matter further.
Thank you for your ongoing support of Hetzner.
Your Web AddiCT(s); response…
Thank you for your email.
Understandable when there is only really one first tier provider.
What about rolling over unused bandwidth? Like free minutes on your
cell phone contract? We are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth
with our specified hosting accounts. Some hosting accounts do not even
come close to using their allocated bandwith within your monthly
cycle.
What happens to the unused bandwith we are paying for? I have been
notified by some users who are hosting in other regions that their
bandwidth is carried over, Mike Stopforth has 1T of bandwith available
due to the fact that his unused hosting bandwidth is carried over to
the next month. He hosts internationally so it is extremely cheap.
Shouldn’t Hetzner consider impelmenting a webhosting bandwidth
carry-over system for South African hosted websites as you have stated
bandwith does cost much much more in South Africa compared to the rest
of the world.
This could be another cost cutting alternate that would appeal to your
clients, it would be very useful to us.
For those of you who have not been following the high cost South African hosting posts:
