Good news! While our prior cache lapsed in mid-2016 after our coupon's expiry - IB has a global budget of ~$10/day, which only goes so far, and it was hard to get a VM that wasn't more than we needed in the area - we've had our eye on offers from cloud providers since then, and
last year it became possible to use one of them in Johannesburg
1 (as of now,
there's more than one in South Africa). Once
our server move was out of the way, we decided to have a closer look.
With
South Afrifur's recent cancellation and ongoing lockdowns, this seemed the perfect time to deploy a replacement. There's been however a slight delay caused by negotiating our host's
own lockdown - they're currently restricting VM deployment to select customers due to capacity concerns. We've noted South Afrifur's cancellation as justification for our use of the region, and hope that'll be adequate; until we get a decision, we're using our credit with them to use their CDN instead, which has nodes in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi. This will probably just be for a few days until it's up.
Five years on, the specification has been upgraded to 68GB of full low-latency SSD, 1GB RAM and a burstable CPU. We suspect regional network connections have also improved in recent years, hopefully we can use this content server for additional states in southern, central and/or eastern Africa (e.g. Kenya, Nigeria), but it'll depend on the results of testing when we actually have the server in hand.
Due to limited storage and transfer, we
may end up serving only thumbnails, website layout and previews from Joburg; the rest coming from Europe as usual. It'll depend on how much traffic is used by it. Outbound transfer in South Africa costs 150-200% that of most regions, equal only to Brazil and the UAE; for non-cloud providers who charge closer to the underlying rate, it's more like 1000%.
(Curiously, serving from the VM via CDN costs 45% of what it'd cost to serve
direct from the VM, because a)
for CDN traffic, Africa's part of
EMEA, not
a separate zone; and b)
VM -> CDN traffic is inclusive - we hope to use this to our advantage to e.g. serve website backgrounds via the CDN, saving our normal monthly allowance for thumbnails etc. Or we may just keep serving them from Europe.)
I appreciate an online community can't replace the experience of meeting friends and fans in person - and selling them art, comics, textiles and trinkets - but I know a few of you use IB; hopefully it helps! We'll try to keep this up at least until the next convention approaches in 2021; after that point, we'll see what offers are available to us.
1 Ironically one of the datacenters our new host uses is just to the south of Croydon (near Islando) in Ekurhuleni; I went to school in South Croydon, albeit in the UK!