Right! I'm in Tokyo, with 4 different 100Mbps or 200Mbps fiber connections (different providers, at 3 locations). In Japan, that's normal btw, and costs about

Right! I'm in Tokyo, with 4 different 100Mbps or 200Mbps fiber connections (different providers, at 3 locations). In Japan, that's normal btw, and costs about $50/mo. Vanilla S3 is so slow, it's not any faster than a bargain VPS hosted in America. CloudFront is WAY FASTER. In Asia, or at least Japan and South Korea, the slowness is psychologically compounded by the much higher speeds people are typically used to. So things hosted on CloudFront (or really any decent CDN with a presence in Japan) feel NORMAL, while most anything served from the USA (or Europe) feels SUPER SLOW. At home or the office, I get 10MB or 20MB per second with ping times of 8ms or so. That's from either CloudFront or AWS Tokyo region. Or downloading Apple OS updates or OpenSolaris images, basically any company down with Akamai or similar. With vanilla US S3 storage or AWS servers in US or US shared hosting like pair.com, it's more like 400KB/sec and 200ms+ pings. Same with Heroku (although I haven't tested that since last year). I think my experiences in this regard are typical here, for both home and most business users. If the server is hosted abroad, it is ghetto-slow unless the owner takes appropriate measures (.jp server or CDN). Not a priority for every site, I understand, but hopefully something worth considering.