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Comment by Dramatize | Hacker News Reader

In Australia I've found that businesses are still scared about having their websites hosted overseas.

We have certain data on Aussie servers thats not allowed to be hosted outside of Australia. Think medical records and such. That said we have backups of backups of backups. The said part about this incident is everyone in the chain who really really should have seen to it that they had good backups had no backups at all.

It may just be that hosting overseas is inappropriate for a local audience - a connection to the USA is far slower than a connection in the same city.

For example, from my work on a fibre connection, pinging a local website takes about 2ms, and a US website about 160ms. Double that for residential DSL.

Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$.

> Also, national bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth to the USA is $$$.

It's generally billed at the same rate for all traffic without distinction. By hosting in the USA you assign the cost for bandwidth to users.

I'm actually in NZ, it might be different in AU, but generally when you buy colocation here you only pay for international bandwidth; national bandwidth is free.

In Australia we get charged the same rate for all traffic, except for various special cases (peering arrangements, AARNet).

The economics of our ISPs and hosts are driven entirely by the price of about 3 major pipes out of the country.

Unless you are running a gaming service, latency hardly matters for 'everyday' websites. With most people on broadband of some sort, 2ms or 160ms ping times is not relevant - they wouldn't even notice the split second delay before the page started loading.

Here's a post by someone in AU demonstrating the effects of latency on web traffic - 10x slowdown.

http://mike.bailey.net.au/2010/07/latency-is-a-killer/

Fair point Steve - I was a little too broad brush in my response. Yes I agree latency matters - but I was replying to your response in the context that you proposed that business was hesitant to host overseas due to latency issues.

My reply was in line with the parent post that the (implied) reason that Aussie business are reluctant to host overseas due to ignorance of options, perceived issues around support etc. From my dealings with Aussie business (of the sort that would host at lower tier hosting firms like the one in the article), they are ecstatic just to have a website. Issues such as latency don't even come into consideration.

And here's information on how increasing speed increases conversion:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-f...

So potentially, the money you save by hosting overseas is lost in lower conversion.

Even within the USA, I'm surprised how few website owners have actually considered this when choosing a host.

Its changing slowly. A lot of my clients are happy to host Overseas these days since the prices are a LOT more competitive (my preference being Atum in Canada).

It was certainly true 5-10 years ago, and may still be true for older people, but my experience has been that you get better support overseas now anyway. The biggest issue for me has been that scheduled downtimes are usually in the middle of my day, but you can work around that.

In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!)

> In my experience the lag time to the US is a huge factor in overseas hosting. Otherwise I'd just have everything setup overseas because Telstra has the entire industry by the nuts in terms of data costs (bring on the NBN!)

It's not Telstra. There's plenty of non-Telstra international transit, and enough (but not plenty) of non-Telstra domestic transit.

The problem is that to run a hosting business in Australia, you don't get huge benefits from scale, and you're having to maintain a high staff member-to-customer ratio. Customers have a lot of protection (a good thing) through Fair Trading, and it seems that (from my experiences working in the industry) Australian users have a higher expectation of customer service.

Plus, there's also just the time-zone thing. Calling up mid-afternoon in Australia puts you at late-night in the US.

Apart from FBI raids, hosting the USA is a much better option.

I run a blog network (http://ozblogistan.com.au) on a pair of Linode VPSes out of their Fremont centre. I periodically reprice hosting in Australia, but basically bandwidth charges make it prohibitive to host locally for the amount of traffic I get.

I'm talking $100+/mth differences.

Still, independent backups are vital. I use tarsnap.

What are the good Australian hosts? We have a bunch of the common shared hosting but..

Sorry, I haven't looked for a while.

I have VPSs with networkpresence.com.au (and we actually share rackspace at Equinix).

We have a couple of VPSs with intervolve.com.au and have found them to be good

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