Tyler ReedYoung Entrepreneur & Speaker

I ordered the first development server for Project Wolf today. Choosing a server wasn’t as easy at I thought it would be, as there were many variables to consider. However at the end of the day, after much debating amongst the team, I decided on a local server.

We could have gone with some cheap overseas hosting, but this project is top notch and should be treated as such. Below are some of the points we discussed before deciding on choosing a development server.

• Cost Effectiveness
  Without a doubt, hosting locally is drastically more expensive when compared to hosting overseas. Not in terms of hardware but bandwidth costs. You are looking to pay anywhere from R93 to R123 per GB (Gigabyte). However, the options to follow justify the local purchase.
• Operations
  If you look at it from an operational point of view, the majority of our first clients will be South African. We want to be able to deliver true local speed. Why waste time moving from an overseas server to a local server? In demonstration scenarios, you want the service to load as fast as possible, even on a really slow connection. That being said, we will be able to quickly and easily add capacity for the Americas, Europe and Asia as we grow.
• Testing, Implementation and Deployment
  Having a local server makes life easier and faster. Every single file upload and page refresh happens much faster, add all the seconds up and we save a lot of production time.
• IP Protection and Security
  The great thing about having a local server, that you are in control of, is that you have legal recourse on SLA (Service Level Agreements), which means it’s easier to protect your service. Another thing I wasn’t happy about was having all our code on a foreign server, which does back-ups to other foreign servers. I want to sleep at night knowing I am in control of our data and that it’s only a drive away.

Last week Thursday, “Project Wolf” was born during one of our weekly team meetings. The project is essentially a new product / service (see SaaS) that will be offered to both businesses and individuals.

At this point in time we don’t want to give too much away, in fact we don’t want to give anything away, but I have to share my excitement. The offering will be available via both the traditional web and the mobile web. Personally, the most exciting aspect of the offering, for me, is that fact that this will be an international product.

Development has been scheduled to start within the next two weeks, as there is a lot of planning that needs to go into this. I hope to keep everyone up-to-date by blogging about the project as we go along. I am really excited and can’t wait to share the finished product with everyone.