From the bit of digging that I've done, it's all free tier domains that are affected. Paid tiers are not affected by this. Given that I've tested from multiple different ISPs, I think this is the fault of Cloudflare intentionally de-prioritising free tier traffic, rather than an issue with local routing.
OP's note about Johannesburg's latency is something I've noticed over the past few weeks in particular. Our servers are hosted in South Africa, yet accessing most of our sites and services from within South Africa causes traffic to be re-routed via other nodes, mostly London (LHR). This is easy to verify by appending cdn-cgi/trace onto a Cloudflare-proxied domain.
Something is definitely up with Cloudflare's Johannesburg data centre. On particularly bad days, TTFB routinely reaches 1-3 seconds. Bypassing Cloudflare immediately drops this to sub 100ms.
In the past, I would have emailed [email protected], but it seems that this channel is no longer available for free tier users. What is the recommended approach these days for reporting issues such as this?
I run an software / creative agency in South Africa (creationlabs.co.za) that works with clients ranging from tiny to large corporates. What I've found is that the direction of the blame very much depends on which side of the fence you're sitting. One the one hand the client blames the agency for being opportunistic, while at the same time the developers get frustrated at what may seem like a never-ending list of unreasonable expectations.
That's not to say that this is what happened here, but in both situations the problem comes down to a lack of effective communication.
The agency here should have communicated from the start how many hours they can reasonably expect to spend on each phase of the project with the given budget, and then provided continuous updates to allow Michael to understand how much time he had remaining to complete the project. Opaque processes, coupled with a lack of transparency and communication is how projects like this leave a sour taste, or worse, fail entirely.
On a personal note, I'm gobsmacked at both the hourly rates as well as the total project hours discussed in this article. A website like this should have taken a fraction of the time. And if outsourced to a professional team in another country, a fraction of the price too.
What about doing something similar to JetBrains, where you offer the product at a significantly discounted rate to startups, rather than based on usage? You would have 1 new customer immediately.
This looks like a fantastic solution. If there were an affordable price point, I would immediately implement this in the edtech platform that we're developing, but the price point puts it completely out of our league for now. (Especially given the exchange rate fluctuations we see as developers in South Africa). Have you by any chance considered offering discounts to:
1. Educational institutions
2. Startups (eg. us)
Offering a free tier to startups, or at a discounted rate would allow them to use the product and become entrenched, by which point the full license would become easily affordable.
Overall looks like a great solution, and definitely a gap in the market. On a side note, I hit the "Try for Free" button on the home page and got a 404.
South Africa is hardly the only country where multivitamins are common. If rationality were the only metric for decision making, I would expect homeopathy to be far less common globally than it is today.
As for Aids denialism, South Africa suffers from a case of cultural antiestablishmentism, particularly in the context of Western medicine. Thankfully our government has stepped up in recent years, and actively promotes HIV/Aids education these days.
Will be interesting to see how Google Hire is used by agencies, as opposed to companies sourcing their own talent.
Obligatory plug: I'm the cofounder of RecruitDoor [1], an applicant tracking system for recruitment agencies. We've been running in South Africa for a few months now, and we'll be branching internationally next month. (Comments and critique welcome, by the way; we're currently still a startup).
https://ipinfo.io works well. Alternatively, CloudFlare also works well if you just need the country code, which it can attach as an HTTP header to each request.
I can highly recommend Mail-in-a-Box [1], especially if you're looking for a solution that is secure, easy to install, and doesn't require any fiddling. You can host it on a cheap VPS for $5 a month and it'll happily chug along without any problems.
Deliverability will only be an issue if you land up on an IP address that was previously abused, so it may be worth checking out the IP address reputation on DNSBL [2] before setting up Mail-in-a-Box.
Make sure you configure an SPF record for the server's IP address, and then also set up DKIM and SPF. I have yet to see any deliverability issues using this setup.
Unfortunately, unless you're paying for a dedicated IP address with Mailgun, their sender reputation is mostly quite bad. We are constantly having to request our account to be moved to a new IP due to them landing up in some blacklist.
Assuming it has an API, I would prefer to use this over a service such as Mailgun. We used to have our own mail server, but without an easy API to get deliverability details per mail, we ended up switching to Mailgun. Since the switch, our deliverability has nosedived (we're currently not paying for a dedicated IP though) and mails are constantly bouncing due to the low reputation of Mailgun's shared IPs.
Mailgun's 30-day retention period is also a bit absurd, since most of our clients require mail audit trails in the region of 6-12 months.
As a South African, I can attest to the exact ads shown by the author on various site, both in incognito mode as well as during normal browsing. I have seen every one of them, and they are awfully persistent and incredibly annoying. Even selecting "Don't show this ad again" seems to do nothing, despite repeated efforts. Particularly frustrating is that there seems to be no way of flagging an advert as fraudulent or malicious.
Currently working on RecruitDoor (http://www.recruitdoor.com) - recruitment software for recruitment agencies that's simple to use and looks good on the eyes. Currently only targeting South African recruitment agencies, but will be going international in the next 2-3 months.
The concept of marketing to an international audience fascinates me. I head up a small web design + development agency in South Africa, and recently I've set my sights on finding international clients, specifically in the US. How do people generally go about this?
What kind of marketing went into this girl's business to do so well in a country that she doesn't even live in?
Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.
We use Sendy (using Amazon SES) to send email newsletters for some our our clients. Recently, recipients have been complaining that newsletters are landing in their spam.
Does anyone have any experience with deliverability, comparing Amazon SES to something like Mailchimp? Are the deliverability rates of Mailchimp really that much better?
Fellow Durbanite! First one I've spotted on HN. Unfortunately Durbs is a bit sparse on the startup scene (at least using the HN definition of startups - ones with a single focus). We're a small general dev shop, busy also busy collaborating with another local company, working together on an elearning solution. Watch this space!
Although they are a fantastic company (often seen as the Google of South Africa in terms of work conditions), calling them a "gaming" company (as they do themselves) is perhaps not as accurate as calling them a "gambling games" company. Since that is what they do - gambling software.