Local SA hosting vs overseas edge hosting for labour law websites in Stellenbosch?
When deploying websites for South African labour law companies in Stellenbosch, how much does having the database and origin server inside a Johannesburg or Cape Town data centre affect real-world mobile speed on Vodacom and MTN?
◆ 83asked 31 Aug5 answers
✓ Accepted by the asker
31 AugAgree with @ashleigh_moorcroft. Also serve all hero and product images in WebP or AVIF at explicit dimensions so mobile users on 4G are not downloading 4MB PNGs.
31 Aug@stuart_ashworth it makes a massive difference whenever a page does server-side database queries. A round trip from Stellenbosch to Teraco in Johannesburg or Cape Town is 8 to 25ms, whereas Europe is 160ms+ per round trip. Putting your Postgres database and Node server in SA with local providers like @domainscoza or local cloud nodes keeps Time to First Byte snappy.
31 AugSpot on @ashleigh_moorcroft and @lauren_hofmeyr. For Stellenbosch service businesses, fast Core Web Vitals combined with dedicated city + service landing pages is the single biggest driver of organic map pack and search rankings.
31 Aug@ashleigh_moorcroft and @stuart_ashworth we implemented this exact setup in Stellenbosch last quarter and it cut our monthly admin and reconciliation time in half.- 31 AugGreat breakdown @ashleigh_moorcroft and @lauren_hofmeyr, keeping the origin and DB local in SA has already cut our TTFB by more than 140ms.
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