5 ms·

In Australia I've found that businesses are still scared about having their websites hosted overseas.

jacques_chester 15y ago
Apart from FBI raids, hosting the USA is a much better option. I run a blog network (http://ozblogistan.com.au http://ozblogistan.com.au) on a pair of Linode VPSes out of their Fremont centre. I periodically reprice hosting in Australia, but basically bandwidth charges make it prohibitive to host locally for the amount of traffic I get. I'm talking $100+/mth differences. Still, independent backups are vital. I use tarsnap.
- dorian-graph 15y ago
  What are the good Australian hosts? We have a bunch of the common shared hosting but..
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    Sorry, I haven't looked for a while.
  - dools 15y ago
    I have VPSs with networkpresence.com.au (and we actually share rackspace at Equinix).
  - dpig 15y ago
    We have a couple of VPSs with intervolve.com.au and have found them to be good
boyter 15y ago
Its changing slowly. A lot of my clients are happy to host Overseas these days since the prices are a LOT more competitive (my preference being Atum in Canada). It was certainly true 5-10 years ago, and may still be true for older people, but my experience has been that you get better support overseas now anyway. The biggest issue for me has been that scheduled downtimes are usually in the middle of my day, but you can work around that.
- dools 15y ago
  In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!)
  - elithrar 15y ago
    > In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!) It's not Telstra. There's plenty of non-Telstra international transit, and enough (but not plenty) of non-Telstra domestic transit. The problem is that to run a hosting business in Australia, you don't get huge benefits from scale, and you're having to maintain a high staff member-to-customer ratio. Customers have a lot of protection (a good thing) through Fair Trading, and it seems that (from my experiences working in the industry) Australian users have a higher expectation of customer service. Plus, there's also just the time-zone thing. Calling up mid-afternoon in Australia puts you at late-night in the US.
noonespecial 15y ago
We have certain data on Aussie servers thats not allowed to be hosted outside of Australia. Think medical records and such. That said we have backups of backups of backups. The said part about this incident is everyone in the chain who really really should have seen to it that they had good backups had no backups at all.
steveh73 15y ago
It may just be that hosting overseas is inappropriate for a local audience - a connection to the USA is far slower than a connection in the same city. For example, from my work on a fibre connection, pinging a local website takes about 2ms, and a US website about 160ms. Double that for residential DSL. Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  > Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$. It's generally billed at the same rate for all traffic without distinction. By hosting in the USA you assign the cost for bandwidth to users.
  - steveh73 15y ago
    I'm actually in NZ, it might be different in AU, but generally when you buy colocation here you only pay for international bandwidth; national bandwidth is free.
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      In Australia we get charged the same rate for all traffic, except for various special cases (peering arrangements, AARNet). The economics of our ISPs and hosts are driven entirely by the price of about 3 major pipes out of the country.
- tobtoh 15y ago
  Unless you are running a gaming service, latency hardly matters for 'everyday' websites. With most people on broadband of some sort, 2ms or 160ms ping times is not relevant - they wouldn't even notice the split second delay before the page started loading.
  - steveh73 15y ago
    Here's a post by someone in AU demonstrating the effects of latency on web traffic - 10x slowdown. http://mike.bailey.net.au/2010/07/latency-is-a-killer/ http://mike.bailey.net.au/2010/07/latency-is-a-killer/

Apart from FBI raids, hosting the USA is a much better option. I run a blog network (http://ozblogistan.com.au http://ozblogistan.com.au) on a pair of Linode VPSes out of their Fremont centre. I periodically reprice hosting in Australia, but basically bandwidth charges make it prohibitive to host locally for the amount of traffic I get. I'm talking $100+/mth differences. Still, independent backups are vital. I use tarsnap.

dorian-graph 15y ago
What are the good Australian hosts? We have a bunch of the common shared hosting but..
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  Sorry, I haven't looked for a while.
- dools 15y ago
  I have VPSs with networkpresence.com.au (and we actually share rackspace at Equinix).
- dpig 15y ago
  We have a couple of VPSs with intervolve.com.au and have found them to be good

boyter 15y ago

Its changing slowly. A lot of my clients are happy to host Overseas these days since the prices are a LOT more competitive (my preference being Atum in Canada). It was certainly true 5-10 years ago, and may still be true for older people, but my experience has been that you get better support overseas now anyway. The biggest issue for me has been that scheduled downtimes are usually in the middle of my day, but you can work around that.

dools 15y ago
In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!)
- elithrar 15y ago
  > In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!) It's not Telstra. There's plenty of non-Telstra international transit, and enough (but not plenty) of non-Telstra domestic transit. The problem is that to run a hosting business in Australia, you don't get huge benefits from scale, and you're having to maintain a high staff member-to-customer ratio. Customers have a lot of protection (a good thing) through Fair Trading, and it seems that (from my experiences working in the industry) Australian users have a higher expectation of customer service. Plus, there's also just the time-zone thing. Calling up mid-afternoon in Australia puts you at late-night in the US.

noonespecial 15y ago

We have certain data on Aussie servers thats not allowed to be hosted outside of Australia. Think medical records and such. That said we have backups of backups of backups. The said part about this incident is everyone in the chain who really really should have seen to it that they had good backups had no backups at all.

steveh73 15y ago

It may just be that hosting overseas is inappropriate for a local audience - a connection to the USA is far slower than a connection in the same city. For example, from my work on a fibre connection, pinging a local website takes about 2ms, and a US website about 160ms. Double that for residential DSL. Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$.

jacques_chester 15y ago
> Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$. It's generally billed at the same rate for all traffic without distinction. By hosting in the USA you assign the cost for bandwidth to users.
- steveh73 15y ago
  I'm actually in NZ, it might be different in AU, but generally when you buy colocation here you only pay for international bandwidth; national bandwidth is free.
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    In Australia we get charged the same rate for all traffic, except for various special cases (peering arrangements, AARNet). The economics of our ISPs and hosts are driven entirely by the price of about 3 major pipes out of the country.
tobtoh 15y ago
Unless you are running a gaming service, latency hardly matters for 'everyday' websites. With most people on broadband of some sort, 2ms or 160ms ping times is not relevant - they wouldn't even notice the split second delay before the page started loading.
- steveh73 15y ago
  Here's a post by someone in AU demonstrating the effects of latency on web traffic - 10x slowdown. http://mike.bailey.net.au/2010/07/latency-is-a-killer/ http://mike.bailey.net.au/2010/07/latency-is-a-killer/