My site, greenman.co.za and a few others should be moving shortly (and no, it’s not due to the vast amounts of traffic I’m getting!)
Top of the list is Circular Systems, who look like they have some good deals. If the site goes down, you know who to blame.
Main reasons for the choice are the unlimited bandwidth they offer, and the root access. It’s been quite a struggle to get root access at an affordable price – so many places will happily give you the usual ‘cgi’ library, a limited number of MySQL databases etc, but I don’t like being restricted in that way, and I’d prefer a box I can destroy at my leisure. They give an option of FreeBSD, and various Linux distros (Gentoo, Debian, Slackware and Red Hat).
They’re based in Cape Town, which is a real plus. I was prepared to move overseas if needs be, but am very happy that it seems someone in South Africa can be competitive and, so far at least, professional.
I don’t know anyone who’s used them, and if anyone has had any bad experiences with them, now’s the time to tell me…
NOTE: See the update Moving to LayeredTech
Several of my friends have machines hosted at http://www.layeredtech.com/
They’re relatively cheap, you get a dedicated machine, some good choices on which OS you want, and 1Tb of data transfer.
They’re in the states, so not quite a Proudly South-African brand, but so far I’ve heard nothing bad about them…
Hey nice blog man… came here through the SA Webring thingy of which the picture doesnt seem to work any more.
Anyway .. just wantd to say that if you wanted more people to chekc out your blog,… try blog explosion at this link…
you can check out my stats on my site if you think I’m lying… its awesome.
You are aware that David/cr0n (Circular Systems) hosts all his stuff overseas? So no proudly South African there.
Layered Tech’s support is quite good when you consider the support you get from UUnet and IS here though I’ve mainly only contact Layered Tech via email. Chris Murphy (chrism@layeredtech.com) is one of Layered’s clued up sales staff.
It turned out that it is a problem getting services from Circular Systems. They are reliant on their overseas service provider and I cancelled the order after having waited 10 days. We are now in the process of trying layeredtech.com. Its a little more expensive than initially budgeted for private use but greenman is making a killing on Google ads 😛 Thanks for the referral, guys. 🙂
Hi there,
As owner of Circular Systems, every known again I do some searching for words relating to our company.
I came across greenman’s site.
I thought I’d take the time to reply to some of the comments that have been made here about the company.
Firstly,
Jacques, you are correct in saying that our servers are located overseas and as most would know that this is due to the extremely over priced bandwidth costs in South Africa. We are therefore forced to make use of international bandwidth. We would however love to bring our servers home.
Secondly,
Anique, at the time of you placing your order for a Virtual Server it seems that our up-provider had many problems and a huge back log. This has now been sorted out. As for our other services, we have our own servers for this and are therefore in full control. We have a partnership agreement with one of the leaders in Virtual Server Providers to supply the service to South Africa.
I trust that this has cleared up some concerns and urge anybody to feel free to contact us with regards to any of our services or queries.
An update to the previous reply of mine:
Circular Systems / VirtualServers.CO.ZA now make use of our very own servers for hosting and virtual servers. Yes, we have grown quite a lot since the beginning of 2005!
We are not dependent on any other company to get our own Virtual Servers up and running anymore!