Barrack , We did a study for a client last year and our finding is that the current ones cannot benefit from economies of scale, are not able to attract high volume third party business both local as well as international - should be TIA942 and preferably Tier4 . data centre is a volume business and we need to break the glass ceiling to compete globally. The fibres that landed in Kenya will ONLY take away the business even more efficiently than before unless we have a national strategy or a big operator decides to step in to move the country past the glass ceiling. Cheers MM From: kictanet-bounces+mureithi=summitstrategies.co.ke@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+mureithi=summitstrategies.co.ke@lists.kictanet.or.k e] On Behalf Of Barrack Otieno Sent: 06 February 2010 09:20 To: mureithi@summitstrategies.co.ke Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: Re: [kictanet] Local Content: Cost of Local Hosting Wes, Great observation, i know of a number of data centres locally, i wonder whether any research has been done to establish whether they are profitable ventures, as you have mentioned it seems cheaper to host externally however this has its own ramifications that you have rightly quoted. Regards On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 11:30 PM, wesley kirinya <kiriinya2000@yahoo.com> wrote: Bandwidth costs seem to be coming down and that's welcome news. However an important area seems to be largely ignored and that's the cost of hosting locally. A Dedicated server in the U.S/Europe (8 Core Processor, 6GB RAM, 3,000GB Bandwidth, 500GB disk space, ...) costs about $500/month. I believe in Kenya that would cost about 8-10 times more and that's without the 3,000GB bandwidth. With bandwidth becoming cheaper and better quality, it's far cheaper to host the local content internationally, and end-users might not feel a big difference in speed and quality. Factors leading to high hosting cost might be cost of physical space and electricity (highly priced and unstable). If these are the major reasons why hosting costs are high, then we cannot expect the cost to come down any sooner no matter how many fibres are coming to Kenya. Local companies (e.g. BPOs dealing with large volumes of data) and local branches of international companies looking for secure off-site back up might also do it from internationally located servers, where the companies running those servers not only offer lower cost but also more experience which leads to better service. As one of such companies puts it ,"98% of replies within 30 mintues, 99.9% Network Uptime Guarantee, ...". Therefore we are looking at a situation where local content might be hosted internationally. 8~! _______________________________________________ kictanet mailing list kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet This message was sent to: otieno.barrack@gmail.com Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/options/kictanet/otieno.barrack%40gmail. com -- Barrack O. Otieno Administrative Manager Afriregister Ltd (Ke) P.o.Box 21682 Nairobi 00100 Tel: +254721325277 +254733206359 +254202498789 Riara Road, Bamboo Lane www.afriregister.com www.afriregister.co.ke ICANN accredited registrar. Skype: barrack.otieno