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Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

For someone who knows about networking can you please comment on the following:

1. What would be the downside of hosting my Apache server on Hezner instead of AWS? Will it affect load times, website SEO, downtime?

2. Hosting Mysql Server on CX31 on Hezner instead of AWS? If my Apache server is on Ec2 and I make a connection to a Mysql server on Hezner will it affect performance of my sites because they're hosted on different places?

I have a very basic understanding of networking, so appreciate any comments from someone who knows about these.

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Since I have some experience with Hetzner:

1. Pings within Europe can be a bit longer than to other providers, they lack peering with some providers. However, nothing noticeable (10-20ms max) and behind cloudflare TTFB wasn't longer than with other providers. Keep in mind that this is central Europe, ~15ms more from the US compared to Google Cloud BE or OVH in France and around ~20-25ms longer latency to the US compared to UK/Ireland. I've never experienced downtime but follow their status on twitter and they sometimes have (announced) maintenance for vhosts, think they don't live migrate customers. But I've also experienced that with AWS.

SEO is dependent on response times and the provider shouldn't make a difference.

2. That shouldn't be an issue and they peer with Amazon in Frankfurt. Expect 20ms round trip per db query (from a European DC). Can make a difference for websites with a lot of small queries. I would keep webserver and database closer together and rather keep Apache also on Hetzner.

1. Load time depends on the location of your visitors, see #2. Downtime is hard to evaluate, I expect the cloud to be fairly stable based on my experience with Hetzner.

2. For sure of you are using AWS in US: Traffic across the atlantic will incur at least ~65ms latency per roundtrip.

Thanks. So it would be best to host on Hezner too. That's fine with me.

Can you comment if the location of my IP will affect my website SEO wrt to USA visitors?

SEO is a black box, so there are no definite answers. It will affect load times (the 60ms) and that could have an effect on search engines.

Highly doubt Google and others would punish you for having a slightly bigger latency to your server and back.

If that was the case, all the companies that are hosted in the US would already be punished in Europe.

No it won't. US for European servers is no problem, round trip of <200ms is hardly noticeable (unless you have a lot of round trips and no CDN). It appears that Google looks at render times (at least that's what they communicate) and it's easy to lose 200ms by having 5 js resources even if the server is close. But Asian visitors will notice a deterioration if you had a server in US-West before. Latency Europe-East Asia/Australia is very high.

Keep the response form Apache as small as possible and put static content in a CDN. Your SEO shouldn't be affected by that.

That said, noone knows the rules for Googles Ranking algorithm, so I guess you will have to try.

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