I'm investigating a hosting solution for my site and after all the praise they've received on here I thought I'd take a look at Rackspace.

It looks good, particularly with respect to growing the site etc.

Like most things in the UK though, it's more expensive here than in the US. I also have to pay VAT on the thing too.

For almost identical kit (650Mhz vs 750Mhz) I am quoted the following per month:

UK: £359 (inc VAT)
US: £254

Are there any UK guys out there hosting on Rackspace's US servers to save money? What issues should I be aware of if I try this. The majority of my readership is in the UK, would I notice too much lag by putting the server in the US?

Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated.

Requests will take longer to serve if they are coming from the UK to a US server than if they stay within the UK. The difference could be as much as a factor of two, since for small files the connection times is almost entirely tied to round trip time.

This will have a side effect of requiring more memory in the server, since it will have more connections open at once.

The above notwithstanding, unless you have some other reason for prefering a UK-based server (EU privacy laws, perhaps, or maybe just prefering to deal with people who speak English properly) I don't think the price differential would be worth it.

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The above applied only to web servers, of course. For game servers you'd always want the closest location.
</edit>

Originally posted by cperciva
(EU privacy laws, perhaps, or maybe just prefering to deal with people who speak English properly) I don't think the price differential would be worth it.


Very good point and one I'd completely forgotten about. My privacy policy would prevent me hosting it in the US! That's one query sorted then!

Thanks for reminding me!

With the price difference, I personally think that hosting the site in the US should be fine. I'm located in the UK with a server in the Rackspace US data center. But then my visitors are mostly from the US. Even if my visitors were in the UK, to start with, I would go with the cheaper solution, Rackspace US and then in the future, also get a server in their UK data center, that'll give you global redundancy, or close to it, since most visitors are from UK and US.

Alan