On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0100, Robert Lusby wrote:
Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region, and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre would be a better option.
Does anyone have any statistics on this?
No formal statistics, just a lot of experience. You may be unsurprised to learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than serving from within Australia. That being said, there's a fair bit less distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region than from the US. That is predicated on having good direct links, which is eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from China to Australia via San Jose... aaargh). Then again, hosting within Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to help you any from a cost PoV. Anyone living in this part of the world is used to everything taking a painful amount of time to load anyway, so unless you're doing something really latency-critical (online gaming and VoIP are the only things that leap to mind), hosting in a good west coast DC close to the trans-pacific links will cost you an order of magnitude less and won't have any noticeable impact on your visitor satisfaction scores.
Or ... does anyone know of a "ping" tool we can use, hosted in Australia?
No shortage of APAC looking glasses / tools listed at traceroute.org. - Matt -- <FreeFrag> The most secure computer in the world is one not connected to the internet. Thats why I recommend Telstra ADSL. -- bash.org/?168859