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Ask HN: What would it take to setup a server farm in Haiti

4 points by zekenie 13y ago

First let me say that I'm an American. I was doing some programming work in Haiti with a friend who's Haitian. We were building a text message tool that ran off of GSM modems and netbooks. We got to talking about tech in low resource settings. As far as we can tell, there are no server companies in Haiti. This is a problem because all web services are very slow. All traffic has to go to US servers. Aside from reliable electricity, what would be needed for an MVP? What types of internet connections? Just a static IP and decent bandwidth? In terms of servers, could a bunch of raspberry pis ever work? I'm more of a programmer than a server person but I'm interested in testing this idea out some day.

codemonkeymike 13y ago
I believe there is an NPR Marketplace podcast about the difficulties of building a school in Haiti, I can't imagine how much harder it would be if you needed constant power. Edit: found it http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-tuesday-podcast-how-to-build-a-school-in-haiti http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-tues... Maybe Dominican Republic would be a better option
- zekenie 13y ago
  Maybe... I've been to both. It would be hard. But, I also think there would have to be a change in expectations about what a server farm is... What it looks like. I think it could be very important to make it work in Haiti, even if it was a modest start.
iSloth 13y ago
Your problem is the countries network infrastructure not the physical location of the servers, for example here in the UK basically all websites will load quick, it's hard to tell just from page load speeds if a server was located 10 miles down the road from me in the UK, or across the pond in the USA. However Haiti is closer to the USA than the UK, so it's really not server location that makes the difference. Building a server farm in Haiti isn't really going to improve the speed of web services, what you would need to look at is getting better network infrastructure around the country and back to the main internet exchanges within the US. Normally the problems you face here is the price of sub-sea cable bandwidth is greatly dependant on the economies of scale; they typically want massive investments to drive the prices down to reasonable levels. Then when you have the off-island bandwidth sorted you need to build faster local infrastructure to get this bandwidth to your users. Once you have faster internet connections with decent global connectivity you will naturally start to see service providers build data centers out there.

4 points by zekenie 13y ago

codemonkeymike 13y ago

I believe there is an NPR Marketplace podcast about the difficulties of building a school in Haiti, I can't imagine how much harder it would be if you needed constant power. Edit: found it http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-tuesday-podcast-how-to-build-a-school-in-haiti http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-tues... Maybe Dominican Republic would be a better option

zekenie 13y ago
Maybe... I've been to both. It would be hard. But, I also think there would have to be a change in expectations about what a server farm is... What it looks like. I think it could be very important to make it work in Haiti, even if it was a modest start.

iSloth 13y ago

Your problem is the countries network infrastructure not the physical location of the servers, for example here in the UK basically all websites will load quick, it's hard to tell just from page load speeds if a server was located 10 miles down the road from me in the UK, or across the pond in the USA. However Haiti is closer to the USA than the UK, so it's really not server location that makes the difference. Building a server farm in Haiti isn't really going to improve the speed of web services, what you would need to look at is getting better network infrastructure around the country and back to the main internet exchanges within the US. Normally the problems you face here is the price of sub-sea cable bandwidth is greatly dependant on the economies of scale; they typically want massive investments to drive the prices down to reasonable levels. Then when you have the off-island bandwidth sorted you need to build faster local infrastructure to get this bandwidth to your users. Once you have faster internet connections with decent global connectivity you will naturally start to see service providers build data centers out there.