HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the best cloud region to serve Japan and Australia?

1 points by garganzol ↗ HN
Currently we have two web servers that serve America and Europe. The servers are at East US and Ireland, they are shown as blue dots in the map:

https://imgur.com/a/IboyDCu

This simple configuration serves us well. However, Japan and Australia turned out to be very lucrative markets for us. If you take a closer look at the provided map, you'll see that those locations have a lot of red dots indicating some uncomfortable latency > 200 ms.

What is the best location for a third web server to serve Japan and Australia well?

The list of available regions to choose from: https://imgur.com/a/YXxRxrY

Southeast Asia region looks like a natural choice, but maybe someone has deeper experience with that area?

4 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] thread
magicbuzz
You won’t get low latency in Australia without having a server somewhere in the country, usually Sydney. If you’re using https, TLS has a number of round trips to complete handshaking and users will see a lot of benefit from lower latency.
gjmulhol
I have had good luck using SE Asia (in our case Singpore) for serving the region. The undersea cable map (https://i.redd.it/eo6248sth0pz.png) shows that it is probably your best bet, but as magicbuzz says, it is likely too far for anything where latency makes to pay a major price, which is most things these days.
QuinnyPig
Tokyo region is non-trivially more expensive than Sydney, which may factor in.
krn
Singapore is the best cloud region in Asia, if you want to cover the entire continent. Like no other location, it puts you within 100ms from Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney, New Delhi, Bangkok, Taipei, Seoul and Hong Kong[1].

[1] https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Singapore