One huge disadvantage also is that many Africans don't have access or the ability to get credit cards and so it locks them out of the ability to pay for hosting and cloud services. If someone can figure out how to connect the local SMS payment infrastructures that most countries have to Amazon AWS, then there could be some serious dough gained from the developer community. I learned this the hard way when I did a presentation on deploying Python Apps to Amazon at klab.rw in Rwanda. Everyone loved it but no one could actually try it out because even for the Free Tier AWS requires a CC.
Well that's a huge disadvantage; I had to ask someone to pay for my domain. Telecommunication companies are in a position to offer such a solution. I heard Telecel,Zimbabwe has been working on such a solution .
