During the recent years, Iranian government has invested a lot of money to develop and expand the local datacenters. Although none of them was profitable for the government but it worked hard to keep these datacenters alive. According to the latest statistics revealed by Iran’s IT Ministry currently more than 52% of Iran’s popular websites are hosted in foreign datacenters.
Iran has worked hard to market and promote its datacenters but it seems this project of government has failed. The main problem of local datacenters is supplying bandwidth for websites require high volume of traffics. Iranian datacenters cannot provide the needed bandwidth for reasonable price so Iranian webmasters prefer to go with foreign datacenters rather than staying with local ones.
In the mean time, Germany based datacenters are leading in Iranian market by hosting 20% of popular websites. Datacenters of United States and Canada are the other popular destinations for Iran’s popular websites.
Recently the fluctuations of exchange markets have been decreased and this has cut the price of foreign hosting services. A large number of Iranian webmasters moved their websites to local datacenters when the currency rates increased dramatically but now they are moving back their websites to foreign countries.
Iran’s deputy communications and technology minister Ali Hakim-Javadi has warned governmental organizations of moving their websites to foreign datacenters. Base on this announcement, the websites using foreign hosting services will be blocked in country without prior notification.