On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org> wrote:
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.
Given that the bulk of the population density in Australia is on the eastern coast near Sydney, and the *only* fiber path going anywhere near Asia from Sydney does so via Guam, the light path traveled from Sydney to Guam to La Union (PH) to Hong Kong isn't appreciably shorter than the light path from Sydney to Hawaii to the US--which is covered by roughly 6x as many fiber runs as the Guam pathway, and is thus somewhat cheaper to get onto--you might as well host on the west coast of the US as in Hong Kong. (and *that* was a horrific run-on sentence!) If I look at average data for the past five years between Sydney and Hong Kong, San Jose, Singapore, and Los Angeles, on average it's better to serve Sydney from Los Angeles than Hong Kong or Singapore: mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE HKI total daily data files read: 1559 AUE to HKI latency (min/avg/max): 134.216/173.273/1052.158 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SJC total daily data files read: 1558 AUE to SJC latency (min/avg/max): 149.829/176.674/308.637 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SG1 total daily data files read: 1558 AUE to SG1 latency (min/avg/max): 101.871/204.485/999 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE LAX total daily data files read: 931 AUE to LAX latency (min/avg/max): 157.603/166.720/999 mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance>
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.
It's not really a matter of eye-wateringly expensive, so much as simple basic existence; there's no direct Sydney to southern Asia fiber, at the moment; the best you can do is hop through Papua New Guinea to Guam, and then back across into southern Asia. (or overshoot up to Japan, and then bounce your way back down from there). Matt