Zoopy goes local and gets fast, really fast

We've just sent out a press release from the Zoopy HQ:

Zoopy increases media delivery speed with local hostingTwo months after receiving investment from Vodacom (which now owns a40% stake in the company), South African social media site Zoopy hasstarted to roll out some of the large scale community improvementsthey hinted at when announcing the Vodacom deal.Members of Zoopy.com, which launched in March 2007, are able to uploadand share videos, photos, podcasts and blogs - both online and via achoice of mobile applications. Until now, users have been doing sousing international bandwidth to connect to Zoopy's overseas servers.This is standard practice for most medium to large online businessesin South Africa, who are often left with little option but to hostinternationally when faced with much higher local hosting fees. Thedownside to hosting outside of the country, however, is reducedloading speed of websites and, in Zoopy's case, media files likevideos and photos.According to Zoopy CEO, Jason Elk, this is now a thing of the past forZoopy visitors. "As of today, we have servers in South Africa thatwill deliver Zoopy content using local bandwidth for South Africans.The significantly slower international speeds and low bandwidth capsin SA (many users only budget for the 3gb they receive per month) haveleft us as frustrated as any other internet user in the country. Sowe're prepared to do what it takes to deliver our media at amazingspeeds, whether viewed on Zoopy.com or embedded on other sites orblogs. And for our members, an increase in upload speeds when addingmedia to your Zoopy profile will make things quicker and moreconvenient too," says Elk.Zoopy has also just increased their upload file size limit from 100mbto 200mb. Elk explains, "If we're giving visitors a quicker and morecomfortable experience over local bandwidth, we wanted to add to theenjoyment by giving them more space to express themselves as well.Members now have 200mb to play with and can upload longer or betterquality versions of their videos, for example. As always, this serviceremains completely free.""These improvements are part of a determined plan to bring the Zoopycommunity everything they need to manage, view and share their mediain all the ways they've hoped for, and more".

This is a very important step for us for various reasons. I wont go in to much detail as there is an entire blog post dedicated to the topic on the Zoopy Blog so head over and read it.For now visit muti and digg and vote up the post.

Locally Hosted SA Site Will Not Succeed

There is a very good reason for this I might add, it has to do with expensive and ineffective hosting packages offered.SA Rocks is now down due to exceeding of bandwidth limits. Brilliant. So what hosting organisations in SA are saying is they are happy to take our money but will only let our sites run up to 2GB per month of bandwidth. What rubbish.There is no promotion of success, no assistance to become a prominent website, it is as if hosts just don't want to see local sites succeed. Why, why is it not possible, what is wrong with this damn industry?I am now forced to either pay 9c per mb over 2GB, or host internationally, both are lose lose for me. Does anyone have any fast and effective suggestions?Update: My hosts have been extremely gracious and increased my bandwidth for the last days of this month. What nice guys/girls!