What’s the difference between local (South African) and International hosting?

The difference is where the web servers are physically located and the response time of the servers (ping / latency).

Another major difference is the cost of data. South Africa’s data fees are quite high compared to the rest of the world and this is why we've chosen to make our high speed servers based either in Germany or the USA available to our clients as an alternative to our local servers. The majority of viewer will never notices a difference in the speed of your website if you host it on our international servers.

Local web hosting would be great for lower traffic websites, where as international hosting will offer you more resources for the same amount per month with very little difference in speed.