hosting overseas

[sladehk]

is there any difference in hosting here and overseas?

im currently running a really small facebook application (<400 users a day) and its on a free joyent accelerator account, and im looking to transfer it. anyone have a cost range on such a setup here or elsewhere? (i heard US hosting is by far cheaped by alot)

thanks

[urban_s0ulja]

Hey Mate

Here's my take and experience on hosting.

Alot of people say they provide "hosting", they run really flashy websites with lots of nice looking pictures of servers on the websites as well. To give you the impression they own/run their own servers.

The reality is that they don't own ANY servers they are doing is just reselling. You may come across a reseller that provides really good service(I havn't yet) but at the end of the day they are at the mercy of the business who runs the servers. So if something goes a miss you have to let the reseller play "messenger" and its very difficult to get any info out of them as they simply don't know.

If its a mission critical application id stay well away from these "resellers".

After quite a bit of messing around with a few different service providers came across,

friendly, reliable, runs his own servers, helpful and competitively priced as well.

What else could you ask for

[Zero Alpha]

I have been using American and Canadian web hosting for 10 years using Australian domain names. Its by far cheaper and nobody can notice the difference.

[Globe]

I have been using American and Canadian web hosting for 10 years using Australian domain names. Its by far cheaper and nobody can notice the difference.

Yep I use Hostgator, cheap and cheerful, no real issues, and when there were it was solved via live chat support. I have nearly 20 websites with them. 4 with .com.au

[cwispy]

Well im obviously a little biased being that I am the person that Urban is refering to, but Zero_Alpha's remark about nobody being able to tell the difference is definitely not true. Depending on who the person viewing the site uses for Internet access will depend on how an overseas host performs due to the path the traffic will take to get there and back, and peering arrangements that their ISP has with bandwidth providers, as international traffic is more expensive than local so providers tend to prefer local over international. This can and has in cases added seconds to the request reaching the servers and getting back. Now if you multiply that by many requests per page load, some visitors will just give up and go elsewhere. Then there is also the issue that the sub-sea cables from Australia to other countries get damaged quite regularly due to seismic activity and other reasons and when this happens the network capacity can be severely affected. Then to top it all off, if there is a severe virus or DDoS, which we have seen numerous times in Australia, reaching sites outside Australia can come to a complete crawl or even a stand still. At least if your hosted within Australia, few of these issues will take your site off-line completely, though you may still see degradation in some instances.

The costs to host something here would probably only be between $5 - $20 a month depending on who you were to use. There is a lot of providers here who could host something like what your looking for, not just me.

Hope that sheds a bit more light on the local / international hosting.

[sladehk]

thanks guys im taking a look
will report back when ive done some research