by Fred Roed on 07/11/12 at 8:00 am
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MWEB recently launched a few new connectivity packages targeting SMME?s. We decided to follow up and managed to grab a few precious moments with Carolyn Holgate, GM of MWEB Connect.
1. Are you seeing a lot of activity in the e-commerce sector? We see a 30% growth in etailing from last year. Are you seeing a lot more online shops being hosted at MWEB?
We can confirm that there certainly is a big demand from our customers for E-commerce products and its definitely something that we will be adding in the future to our current service offering.
*The e-tailing stat of 30% growth is an Australian statistic.
2. Everyone moans about slow bandwidth, cost of internet, etc. Truthfully, how does SA compare internationally?
Although people tend to moan about slow bandwidth, South Africa are not fairing as poorly as the average South African consumer thinks. We are seen as the fastest growing country when it comes to high broadband adoption according to the latest figures by Akamai. With the launch of Telkom?s high speed Internet trial which is taking place in Gauteng, KZN and the Western Cape until the end of January, 2013, we are one step closer to increasing the South African Internet footprint and experiencing first world Internet standards.
In terms of costs, MWEB strongly believes in affordable Internet which is why we have been pushing the industry to lower internet access costs and have lobbied for open peering since 2010.
3. Most small businesses get 1000 visitors a month or less. Why should a small business care about the type of hosting he/she has ? whether it?s uncapped or capped?
MWEB has always had a strong stance in using technology to propel business from the launch phase to the growth phase and we believe that the internet has the potential to showcase your products and services to the world. We also believe that a small business shouldn?t be limited by a website, whether you have 100 visitors or 40 000 visitors per month, opting for an uncapped hosting solution makes more sense as the business owner does not need to worry about any additional costs at the end of the month.
4. You guys have been pioneers of Uncapped Hosting. How has businesses Internet usage has changed since the launch of Uncapped Hosting?
We are finding that there is a growing interest in businesses going online where our Uncapped Hosting base has more than doubled since the beginning of 2012. In addition, our new website self build feature, which allows customers to easily build their own website, has seen just over a 50% growth of users since January 2012.
5. MWEB is seen as one of the big behemoths of hosting and Internet service provision in SA. Are you feeling that it?s more competitive lately or is it still just you guys and the likes of Telkom?
We see our Uncapped Hosting package as a Value Added Service to our customers. Because it?s a Value Added Service, we are able to offer customers hosting at an attractive price as well as make our customers lives that much easier in terms of being a ?one stop shop? for anything Internet and technology related.
6. What advice would you have for a young, budding entrepreneur who wants to get into the online space? What sector do you think holds the most opportunity? (e-commerce, entertainment, cloud services, etc.)
We believe that the small business market has so much more potential in South Africa. Advice would be: Know what business you want to go in and feed off your expertise and skills. Once you have a solid business plan in place, familiarize yourself with the online environment, put your business online and take advantage of Uncapped Website Hosting which will also give you a free .co.za domain and design templates.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
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Tags: Internet, MWEB, online, SMMEs, web hosting, world wide web, www
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Source: http://www.ideate.co.za/2012/11/07/1-min-with-a-superhero-carolyn-holgate-gm-of-mweb-connect/
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