Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : How do I get quick response times from US *and* Australia?

[philoye]

I'm going to be moving to Australia next year and I'm curious about improving response times when accessing a site physically located halfway around the world. In general, it is really slow browsing an Australia site from the US, and vice versa.

My personal site is hosted at Pair in the US. When I move, I want people in the US and Australia to be able to access my site quickly.

Is there a cheap/easy way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance,
phil

[Lubby]

You could buy the .com.au version of your domain and host it on a server in Australia to make it faster for Australian users. This obviously depends on what sort of site you have hosted and whether it is a site that updates or rarely changes...

[dubfire]

If your site is hosted on a quality network you shouldnt have any speed issues accessing your site from Australia, Ive only seen latency issues on some asian/middle eastern countries that dont have direct peering with large and known backbones. Australian ISPs are probably peered to a few major exchange points.

[keliix06]

We have several Australian clients on our US servers who have no problems with speed.

[coight]

Get a host with servers in Los Angeles. Someone on mzima bandwidth should resolve your issue. You should get 160ms from Sydney.

[kyro_02]

I've only experienced no lower then 180ms and no higher then about 200 on fast cali networks (this including game servers and websites)

I get about 300 to some florida servers, but on fast networks I can get as low as 230ms.

The current host I am on, which is in floria I average 240ms.

I have also experienced great response times with Los Angeles game server hosts & webhost networks =)

*I am from melbourne, and ping canberra/sydney at rougly 15-25 ms.

[philoye]

Thanks for all the help... Traceroute.org has also been helpful. A host in California would definitely seem to be the way to go.

FWIW, Dreamhost.com returns times of ~155ms for pings originating from Telstra.
tcruskit.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace?dreamhost.com

(Sorry, I can't make that a link because I have less than 5 posts)

[Tomer]

Originally posted by philoye
Thanks for all the help... Traceroute.org has also been helpful. A host in California would definitely seem to be the way to go.

FWIW, Dreamhost.com returns times of ~155ms for pings originating from Telstra.
tcruskit.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace?dreamhost.com

(Sorry, I can't make that a link because I have less than 5 posts)

That would be the best way.

But if you really wanted the FASTEST you could always write a script that checks the users IP [from US or Australia] and forward the user to the fastest mirror available for that location.

For that you would need a mirror both in the US and in Australia.

- Tomer

[Zyron]

This might be out of your budget, but I sent an email to singtel some time ago:

(p.s. I'm grateful if anyone know of cheaper alternatives in Asia, Australia! )

Hi Zyron,



Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.



We offer standard 19” racks (45U) at around US$430 (monthly recurring costs).



Internet bandwidth is not cheap in Asia. So, we are offering around US$450/Mbps (monthly recurring costs)



We also provide rental of hardware (eg. HP Proliant and Dell Edgeservers).



As for storage, we are offering US$2.50/Gb (monthly recurring costs). Minimum 45Gb.



Pls let me know if you need more other info.



Richard



From: Zyron
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 10:44 PM
To: richard***@singtel.com
Subject: Hosting

Hi!

I am interested in hosting my site in asia,
and I have found your company to be one of the best alternatives.

I already have hosting in europe, and in
usa as well - but I need one in asia as well for optimal performance.

I'm interested in both colocation and dedicated servers,
even shared hosting if you have info on that too.

I want to know about linux servers, and if this is being offered:

* Dedicated IP
* POP3
* SMTP
* Webmail
* PHP 4 (including GD support)
* PHP 5
* Zend Optimizer
* cURL
* Mod_Rewrite support
* Image Magick
* Shell access
* Crontab Access
* .htaccess
* MySQL
* PHPMyAdmin
* SSH (Secure Shell)
* SFTP (Secure FTP)
* Access to Raw Log Files
* Error Logs
* Free technical email support


I would also like information about storage and bandwidth.

[philoye]

But if you really wanted the FASTEST you could always write a script that checks the users IP [from US or Australia] and forward the user to the fastest mirror available for that location.

For that you would need a mirror both in the US and in Australia.

- Tomer

Hmm... that's a cool idea. That may be beyond my skills (both the script and setting up the mirrors for something remotely dynamic). But something to aspire to.

[Zyron]

Originally posted by Tomer
That would be the best way.

But if you really wanted the FASTEST you could always write a script that checks the users IP [from US or Australia] and forward the user to the fastest mirror available for that location.

For that you would need a mirror both in the US and in Australia.

- Tomer

check out the source code of php.net, on how to do this!

They have up to 2 mirrors in every country!


Good luck, and keep us updated!

[shaunewing]

Because of the limitations of the speed of light, Australia (Sydney at least) is usually ~160ms away from the east coast of the US.

Most of our connectivity is direct to San Francisco and Los Angeles, so a host there would be the better option.

Note that we're usually used to US sites being slower, so what may be acceptable to us may be noticeable to somebody from the US.

The Telstra traceroute utility is connected directly into their backbone, so it's not entirely indicative of speeds experienced by users on standard connections.

This is what I get from here in Sydney:

panther:~ sewing$ traceroute dreamhost.com
traceroute to dreamhost.com (66.33.201.141), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 bdr-gw.office.ewingit.com.au (172.16.0.1) 1.097 ms 0.172 ms 0.174 ms
2 loop0.lns2.syd6.internode.on.net (150.101.197.90) 11.636 ms 12.801 ms 13.398 ms
3 gi0-204.cor1.syd6.internode.on.net (150.101.120.89) 14.507 ms 13.339 ms 11.996 ms
4 gi0-0.bdr1.syd6.agile.on.net (150.101.199.232) 11.655 ms 12.695 ms 11.754 ms
5 pos1-1.bdr1.lax1.agile.on.net (203.16.213.153) 179.122 ms 177.579 ms 186.756 ms
6 gigabitethernet3-2.gw1.lax15.alter.net (208.222.8.93) 170.157 ms 171.211 ms 171.669 ms
7 0.so-2-0-0.cl2.lax15.alter.net (152.63.115.214) 170.933 ms 170.129 ms 170.76 ms
8 0.so-4-1-0.xl2.lax7.alter.net (152.63.117.186) 180.037 ms 178.101 ms 178.82 ms
9 0.so-7-1-0.br1.lax7.alter.net (152.63.113.5) 179.062 ms 179.557 ms 180.051 ms
10 so-2-0-0.gar1.losangeles1.level3.net (209.0.227.37) 180.535 ms 180.668 ms 178.593 ms
11 so-0-1-0.bbr2.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.96.89) 169.496 ms so-0-3-0.bbr1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.96.77) 178.116 ms so-0-1-0.bbr2.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.96.89) 184.026 ms
12 ae-21-52.car1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.44) 179.281 ms ae-11-51.car1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.12) 170.514 ms ae-21-56.car1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.172) 184.048 ms
13 ge1-l3.dreamhost.com (4.78.192.66) 180.224 ms 181.391 ms 192.839 ms
14 dreamhost.com (66.33.201.141) 172.953 ms 180.062 ms 190.187 ms

-Shaun

[Zyron]

Originally posted by shaunewing

This is what I get from here in Sydney:


-Shaun

And can you do one to godaddy.com?

The ping to europe from australia is usually 380-400 ms!

It goes through the US for some reason.


I wish godaddy or dreamhost would expand to asia,
cause finding something cheap there is hopeless.

[kyro_02]

Zyron: Pinging from Melboune I get this to godaddy.com:

Average = 209ms

Edit: Would be a good 10-15 ping difference from Sydney/Canberra i'd say =)

[philoye]

Originally posted by shaunewing
Note that we're usually used to US sites being slower, so what may be acceptable to us may be noticeable to somebody from the US.

Thanks Shaun.

But since I'll be living in Sydney, I don't want it to seem like a US site...
Thanks for the heads up on the more real world ping times.

Maybe I need to think more about this mirroring idea...

phil