How do we compare?
Web hosting is about more than prices alone. Any business that requires a sustainable web presence, will look for reliability, service-orientation, performance and understanding of the market.
Items to consider when comparing us to other providers:
- Is the hosting done locally or internationally? This is important in satisfying your target market.
- If the target market is international and price is particularly important, there are numerous, well-established hosting companies that should be considered.
- Further, the price-benefit ratio of international vs. local hosting cannot be directly compared with each other. Our local bandwidth rates in the current telecommunications environment are not internationally competitive by a long margin.
- Consider carefully the length of contracts proposed.
- How are the servers connected to the Internet. Factors such as bandwidth management and capped connections are designed to limit the risk of higher bandwidth usage. (We own and manage our own data centres. Hetzner has an uncapped, redundant fibre link to MTN Business, of which we use approximately 50% at peak times). Consistent service is always a consideration and the proof is in the pudding.
- Price and features mix. Be cautious to discern good value rather than purchasing a combination that leads to inferior infrastructure performance as time progresses.
There are many service providers in the market that are more expensive than us and some that are cheaper. We care passionately about our service to our customers and are committed to providing reliable, quality products.
Knowledge base
We offer 24/7 technical support. We are confident of meeting our high operational standards and are pleased to make this service official with no additional cost to you.
This means that you can now officially contact our technical support team [support@the-artery.co.za] at any time during the day and receive a response within 2 hours.
Support service can be summarised as follows:
Primary Support Channel: Support Centre
Our Network and Servers
We provide a resilient and redundant network infrastructure. Our substantial bandwidth capacity allows us to accommodate spikes in traffic. Added to this, our low bandwidth utilisation allows for maximum uptime and ensures our customers never experience network degradation.
Our server’s fully switched and collision free network ensures that data can be routed even in the event of device or link failure. Our routers are connected to MTN Business’ backbone via a 100 MBit fibre optic cables in Johannesburg and CPT1and a 1GBit fibre optic cable in CPT2, from where we have uncapped access to MTN Business’ local and international network. A second redundant fibre optic cable follows a different physical path to ensure redundancy.
The reality of the greater Internet in South Africa is that there are no 100 MBit or 1GBit paths to any point of significance beyond MTN Business’ data centre. Essentially this means that Hetzner’s connection is never the bottleneck and that the size of the pipe is the lowest bandwidth of all the links that make up the connection from any point on the network to our router.
