Very often people ask me “Hey Ish, could you suggest me a good hosting?”. I would first hesitate because most of the local hosting providers aren’t actually running servers or hosting anything “in Mauritius”. When people contact a company registered in Mauritius and ask for a web host, most of them actually think the content is running locally. False!

Small hosting companies are resellers or affiliates with bigger global hosting providers like Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Softlayer, Amazon, Azure etc. For an individual or a small business it is not easy to get a decent local webhost. Hosting a website in Mauritius is an illusion. Everything runs outside the country.

I once contacted a local datacenter for a Virtual Private Server and I got quoted ~Rs 16K/month for something that would just be 4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM and a couple of Gigabytes of disk space. That was ridiculously absurd.

The Cloud

There is the much hyped of let’s go to the cloud. Okay, let’s knock our local ISPs and see what’s there to offer. Visiting Orange.mu, the Cloud seems to be a luxury only for businesses. We are third-class citizens who don’t deserve a cloud hosting solution. Nothing about cloud packages, price, ever published on their website even though they use sexy terms as in “flexible computing”. Flexible, my banana. One actually has to waste a phone call to get a glimpse of the luxury that they call the Cloud. Then their quotes just blow you off.

One could also turn towards Emtel with yet another hyped service called 1010.mu. Damn! They don’t even run anything in Mauritius. 1010.mu runs on Azure US-West. #facepalm not because of Azure but because of how their marketing team uses the big word “Cloud” to lure in customers while the offers are nothing of that sort. They’re just offering shared-hosting.

Where is the damn cloud that I can benefit from?