Slightly off-topic so apologies:
Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our
client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region,
and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre
would be a better option.
Does anyone have any statistics on this?
Or ... does anyone know of a "ping" tool we can use, hosted in Australia?
Any better ideas welcome.
Thanks.
Did you had a look at the traceroute page from Telstra ?
http://www.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace
Regards,
Erik
Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our
client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region,
and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre
would be a better option.Does anyone have any statistics on this?
No formal statistics, just a lot of experience. You may be unsurprised to
learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than
serving from within Australia. That being said, there's a fair bit less
distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region
than from the US. That is predicated on having good direct links, which is
eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from
China to Australia via San Jose... aaargh). Then again, hosting within
Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to
help you any from a cost PoV.
Anyone living in this part of the world is used to everything taking a
painful amount of time to load anyway, so unless you're doing something
really latency-critical (online gaming and VoIP are the only things that
leap to mind), hosting in a good west coast DC close to the trans-pacific
links will cost you an order of magnitude less and won't have any noticeable
impact on your visitor satisfaction scores.
Or ... does anyone know of a "ping" tool we can use, hosted in Australia?
No shortage of APAC looking glasses / tools listed at traceroute.org.
- Matt
Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our
client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region,
and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre
would be a better option.Does anyone have any statistics on this?
No formal statistics, just a lot of experience. You may be unsurprised to
learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than
serving from within Australia. That being said, there's a fair bit less
distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region
than from the US.
Given that the bulk of the population density in Australia is on the
eastern coast near Sydney, and the *only* fiber path going anywhere
near Asia from Sydney does so via Guam, the light path traveled from
Sydney to Guam to La Union (PH) to Hong Kong isn't appreciably
shorter than the light path from Sydney to Hawaii to the US--which is
covered by roughly 6x as many fiber runs as the Guam pathway, and
is thus somewhat cheaper to get onto--you might as well host on the
west coast of the US as in Hong Kong. (and *that* was a horrific
run-on sentence!)
If I look at average data for the past five years between Sydney and
Hong Kong, San Jose, Singapore, and Los Angeles, on average it's
better to serve Sydney from Los Angeles than Hong Kong or Singapore:
mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE HKI
total daily data files read: 1559
AUE to HKI latency (min/avg/max): 134.216/173.273/1052.158
mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SJC
total daily data files read: 1558
AUE to SJC latency (min/avg/max): 149.829/176.674/308.637
mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SG1
total daily data files read: 1558
AUE to SG1 latency (min/avg/max): 101.871/204.485/999
mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE LAX
total daily data files read: 931
AUE to LAX latency (min/avg/max): 157.603/166.720/999
mpetach@netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance>
That is predicated on having good direct links, which is
eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from
China to Australia via San Jose... aaargh). Then again, hosting within
Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to
help you any from a cost PoV.
It's not really a matter of eye-wateringly expensive, so much as simple
basic existence; there's no direct Sydney to southern Asia fiber, at the
moment; the best you can do is hop through Papua New Guinea to
Guam, and then back across into southern Asia. (or overshoot up to
Japan, and then bounce your way back down from there).
Matt
Also remember, you would be serving Australia only from Australia. if I'm
not mistaken, the Australia backbone is more or less volume based
cahrged...
http://www.aarnet.edu.au/services/aarnet-charging.aspx
"AARNet3 charges are different for Shareholders (Members) and for Non
Shareholders (Associates and Affiliates).
Billing
On
Net and Off Net subscriptions are calculated in October each year, and
invoices must be delivered soon after to allow sufficient time for
customers to pay in advance for the following calendar year.
For
those invoices not paid in full and in advance, On Net and Off Net
Subscriptions, and Access Charges are invoiced by quarter and in
advance.
All Usage charges, including Excess Traffic, are invoiced
retrospectively after each quarter. "
Also remember, you would be serving Australia only from Australia. if I'm
not mistaken, the Australia backbone is more or less volume based
cahrged...
AARNET is the Academic and Research Network, it's not "THE" backbone. (Note: in previous incarnations many years ago it was).
Australia is an island, approximately the same size as continental USA but with only about 22M people. It's not really on the way anywhere, so the submarine capacity is pretty much limited to what is needed to serve Australia.
There exist various submarine cables which go North to Guam and beyond (AJC/PPC1) and East from Sydney (SCCN, Endeavour) as well as SMW3 from Perth to Singapore. SMW3 is a great path into Singapore, except it's old and capacity is limited. Another cable is meant to being built on that path - many people have tried, let's hope the next attempt will work. Connecting these we have really only four sets of land based networks (Telstra, Optus, AAPT, NextGen - not all of these have complete coverage and/or rely on others for redundancy). We're very like Canada in some ways - small population along and edge (Canada is the US border, we're along the Southern and Eastern coasts).
Various providers have capacity on different sets of cables. It's difficult to generalise as, for instance, some providers use the cable into Asia to provide business customers with good connectivity but don't generalise that to residential customers. The kinds of connectivity at the end of those cables varies as well.
If you want to get content into Australia then generally to get the best delivery:
a) Put it on the West Coast of the USA - LA or San Jose - everyone has good connectivity to those places. Look for places you can easily get content into AS4637, AS7473/7474, AS4826 and AS4739. AS4648 for NZ and some of AU as well. (AS4739 will peer with you there 
(*)
b) Deliver it domestically in Australia in Sydney. Equinix Sydney is a good place to start. You can get domestic transit as well as good peering to most providers. It's also close to the large population centres on the East Coast (SYD, MEL).
c) Failing that - try Japan first, then Hong Kong then Singapore. But you will need to combine with a) or b) to give good connectivity to all providers.
Consider various acceleration things like CDNs - especially LLNW, AKAM and EdgeCast who all have delivery capability in AU already.
If anyone has any specific AU questions then I'm happy to try and answer off list. (I work for AS4739 and am responsible for peering and transit so have reasonable interest in delivery of content to customers in AU - we're keen to have GOOD connectivity).
(*) AS4637 has AS1221 behind it, AS7473 has AS7474 (their customers are in AS4804) - they have around 50% of the market together in terms of traffic delivered to the AU market. Tools like peeringdb.com<http://peeringdb.com> and bgp.he.net<http://bgp.he.net> will tell you how everyone's connected.
MMC