Hi,

I asked already in another tread if it would be more interesting for me to have a server located in Europe or in the USA.

As I am located in Belgium I got told that a server location in Europe would be the most interesting for ping's.

But if I take an example,

If I rent a P4 3.06 - 1028Ram - 40GB IDE HD - in France or

If I rent a Dual Xeon 2.4 - 1028Ram - 76SCSI HD in the USA.

How will I make here the best deal.
I ask me this because sometimes when I surf through US based sites, they seems to be very slow for me but I don't know if this comes do to there servers? or there network? or something else.

Please note that I will not be a reseller or something.
I will use the server for my Online Shop and for a Classifieds site and I wish only that the pages are loaded very quickly.
There will be 2 huge Clients databases.
Pictures will be located outside of the database

Regards

www.lockedonhosting.net

http://shared.**********.com very graphic intensive

www.managed.com

www.servermatrix.com

www.nocster.com

www.serverbeach.com

www.liquidweb.com

www.gnax.com

load all those pages and see which you like the best then find a server on that network.

that didn't answer his original question

Is the server location more important than performance?


personally i'd choose performance

Yes, me too but as I am a novice?

I think if only 10 people are online in the same time and connects to the MySQL database, the French located server should be better.

But what happans when 100 people are online in the same time? I think at that moment the performance should be more important referred to all what I have read already around this forum.

his question is not important, he is looking for a good fast loading website from his location, so the more important issue is him finding such a host, more so then having a question answered.

Well, as long as the server is situated in Europe or the USA, then perfomance would be what counts. But i'd strongly suggest against renting a server from Asia.

Anyway, if you're going European, i'd recommend UH-Hosting, but really a budget to work towards would help :) Take a look and see if you like them:

uh-hosting.co.uk/services/dedicated/

(Crappy vBulletin wont let me post an url until Ive made 5 posts or more with my new account, lol)

Pros: Good support, quality bandwidth, nice hardware, good datacentre.

Cons: Typical British expensive prices when it comes to the world of hosting.

Hello.

European bandwidth/servers are not *that* expensive as they used to be.
A lot of competion has forced the pricing down these days.

The question to ask yourself, where do most of your clients come from? If they are from Europe then the ping times will of course be a lot lower if you have a server in Europe, and vice versa :)

Regards,
Thomas Currie

I've always valued performance over location. I can max my connection from all the American machines I've had at EV1, ServerMatrix/ThePlanet, and GNAX through to the UK.

Location is not very much important, however, it somehow does affect performance.

e.g Asia - Europe :D Half a globe apart... don't expect good things.

Anything hosted in US is generally good since its the hub for internet.

I too would take preformance

preformance is better than location :)

Hmm just can tell you that you might wanna go for www.easydedicated.com though, but i recommend not to order if they dont have any servers available ;) ..
I think you should get something really cheap in that range what you need with a almost good network, youll might try.

I'm from Belgium too, and a few years ago I also needed a dedicated server for my projects. I looked at our local providers, and the ones in the USA , and after much doubt I went to an american company and I didnt regret it for a second since then.

The ping difference could be ignored if the webhost has a good connection. At normal times you dont even notice that the server is located about 1/4 around the world. Only at peak moments things start to get a little bit slower .. not slow enough to annoy the visitors, but at list slow enough to notice. Also thanks to the timezone difference, we here have a different peak moment then the americans, so their traffic doesnt have that much influence on the loading times of our sites.

The bandwidth used to be much expensive here, the difference has become smaller over the years, but it still is there. Also note that the big american providers work at a whole oter level then our providers, at least the local ones. Here they count with amounts of 10/20/30 gb for different packages, in usa they count more like 300/500/1000 gb for their servers. I have about 150 gig traffic per month ... with a belgian hosting it would cost me extra each month, with american host the bandwidth limit just seems unreachable so I never have to worry about traffic.

Another thing : american hosting companys tend to be 10 times bigger, so they have more people ready for solving problems, and they are also most likely to have people ready 24/24 .

So its not really a quality difference for me, I think any european provider could deliver any server at the same setup cost, but its the huge quantity (and thus price) difference of all other things that come once you are ready to use the server. The only exception seems to be a handfull of UK companies that might have the best of both worlds... nearby enough for a good ping, and yet big and proffesional enough to offer a nice amount of bandwidth and support for a relatively low price like the americans do.


But still : I suggest you use a american hosting.

.1 seconds of delay isnt noticeable compared the delay caused by a maxed our machine. If your doing webhosting then i think the US based machine with better performance will perform better.

If your hosting latency sensitive applications such as gameservers on the other hand then ping times get much more important.

Originally posted by odoisc
with american host the bandwidth limit just seems unreachable

thats how the hosts that offer 1000GB for < $100 stay in business

It definately depends what you're doing... Doing a lot of streaming media may see some poor performance because of distance, and then game servers would definately take a hit. If you're just looking to serve web pages, etc. though I'd say performance is more important than location.

If you wanna go for one of those big companys in the usa, i think you also can go with easydedicated, they are in netherlands, offer also 1000gb for 99$(amd 2200xp+,1gb ddr)...the 2.8ghz p4 machine with 1gb ddr is 120$...i cant tell about the performance yet, since ive ordered in the last time :( ... But ive seen one experience report on this forum and that wasnt bad ^^ .
The pings and tracert are even from germany ok i think (the network should be very fine with this connectivity) ;) .. the ping is also very fine :D
Too bad for me, that paypal had to verify me, wanna have a dedi from them, then ill post my experience report here :D

I think that location is pretty important. I would much rather have a P4 with a gig of RAM that has 99.95% uptime as opposed to a Dual Xeon with 2 gigs of RAM that only has a 98% uptime (or less). The difference between the two scenarios boils down to where the server is located not their performance. The actual determining factors have to do with the use of the server though.