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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner is nirvana for pre-ramen profitable big data startups. You can build a cluster for a whole lot less than Amazon-- in many cases 1/10th the cost (depending on which resources are higher priority, for us.)

The question is-- can you host in germany and serve a customer base that is primarily in the USA? Our application isn't too latency intensive... but this is my primary concern.

Would it be stupid for an american startup to locate there?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has direct experience.

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Don't forget that "hosted in Germany" is a quality mark with which you can advertise. Especially International Customers don't like the idea of their data being stored in a country where the Patriot Act is a present reality.

I'm not sure how far "Vorsprung durch Technik"[1] would go as a competitive advantage with regards to your particular choosen hosting provider -- it will always just be hosting to your end users -- but I like the sentiment :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorsprung_durch_Technik

It's not even about a choice, as companies from EU countries can't store store user identification data of EU citizens in US servers. So you are more or less legally forced to have (some) servers in EU.

Actually any US company can self-certify under the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework and be eligible to store data from the EU.

Don't forget that "Hosted in Germany" is also a red flag for a lot of companies that they may be arbitrarily assessed massive fees to prop up other businesses[1]. As is the same with many EU countries[2][3]. You're taking a risk wherever your data is stored.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17785613 [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a... [3] http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/french-court-fines-google...

So, you can either have to implement good data protection so that your users don't have to worry about the FBI snooping in the U.S., or you can run the risk that some country in the EU decides to prop up some failing industry by extracting unreasonable tolls out of your company. Personally, I'd go with the former, but that's just my opinion.

Potentially you can work around some of the latency issues by using a CDN.

In Australia (where latency to anywhere cheap-to-host sucks) many people use Rackspace CloudFiles because that gives you cheap access the the Akamai CDN. Akamai has multiple points-of-presence in Australia, unlike the Amazon CDN.

For apps aimed at the US market there are a huge number of reasonably priced CDNs.

If the price is right and latency really is not an issue, I don't see why not. If you setup your infrastructure right it should be fairly easy to move to another host if things don't work out. The main thing to be wary of is laws that differ from yours in that locality - whether or not there is anything relevant that you need to consider here very much depends on what you are planning to host.

I would as well. What is the typical latency from the west coast and east coast of the US?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898404

Thanks!

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