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We are building a website that need to be dedicatedly hosted at some point.

We are physically located in Australia, but the colocation/dedicated hosting is ridiculously expensive in Australia, especially the throughput (20GB can be $100/month).

We are thinking to co-locate a server in Hong Kong, where we find lots of budget options, but we are not sure the quality of the service there.

Has anyone had any experience of using the dedicated server in Hong Kong? How does it feel when accessing from US/Australia/Europe etc.

Please advise. Very much appreciated.

zhou
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Many colocation providers will have sample files you can download, so you can test their uplink speeds.

I would suggest contacting a few of the companies in HK and asking if they have something like that available or if they can set something up temporarily for you to test.

Personally, we don't have any servers colocated in HK, but we do have an office there and we regularly have time-sensitive traffic (video conferencing) between HK and the west coast of the United States without any noticeable delay.

David
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Where are your primary customer hubs? Latency may be an issue to the US. You're looking at something like 130ms latency HK->SF if you're well connected. This is going to be perceptible to users who are accustomed to 30-80ms to their favorite sites. HK->Sydney is going to be similar latency.

Is your app such that you can shard it? Bandwidth inside Australia is probably cheaper if you can get it.

Paul McMillan
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  • The primary customers would be in US, Australia and China according to the plan. However I don't have experience of designing a sharded website. Would you be able to point some good reference materials please? much appreciated. Thanks. – zhou Oct 20 '10 at 04:49
  • Sharding just refers to designing your app such that it can run concurrently on several servers. Depending on what you're doing, this can involve completely separate sites (and servers) for geographically disparate customers, or it can involve partitioning the data such that the servers only need to sync with each other every so often (so the bandwidth costs and intraserver latency don't kill you). Generally though, building an app that lets you use the closest geographic server rather than requiring a single centralized server. – Paul McMillan Oct 20 '10 at 04:56