Website speed overseas

[Etsudo]

Hi! Back in the 90s, hosting a website in Europe when it was mostly visited by people in USA was unthinkable, as the loading times would be terrible.

But since everything runs so fast these days, does that still matter? If a website with 100-200kb of data loaded per page is hosted in Germany for example, how much of a delay is that for people browsing in America?

 

[Gryz]

Nobody seems to be willing to burn their fingers on this one.
And to be honest, I don't know the answer either. I'm not running a large website myself, after all.
But I got a few remarks.

1) Large content-providers do not have their web-hosting machines located in one single location. Companies like Google, Facebook and others have data-centers on many continents. I also believe Google has deals with large ISPs to deploy caching-servers in the ISPs networks, to improve performance.

2) Even when you don't have the money to build multiple data-centers, you can still do all kinds of caching tricks. Companies like Akamai and CloudFlare have so-called Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Your webpages will be distributed to the CDN-servers around the globe. And users worldwide will have better performance (and reliability).

So it seems people do think that having a webserver on one continent, and customers on other continents, is not an optimal solution. In how far it is not optimal, but still acceptable, I don't know.

3) It's not all about the size of the webpages. The amount of round-trip-times is just as important (or more important). A typical webpage is not a single document, but consists of a few (or many) separate documents. HTML page, jpgs, flash, etc. Depending on technology used in browsers, servers and the webpages themselves, a user viewing a single page might need to do multiple transfers. For every transfer, the RTT adds up. Browsers don't do a new TCP connection for each document anymore, but they still need to do request/reply. I'm not an expert on web-issues, hopefully someone else on this forum knows more.

There has been noticable improvement on this issue over the years. I used to frequent a forum in Australia very often (and I'm on europe). That was *really* slow. However, with the improvements in browsers and http, performance has improved from hairpulling-slow to reasonably fast now.

 

[Etsudo]

I think I will gamble and host my website locally all things considered. Thanks for your help!

 

[Berliner]

When everything runs smoothly your site will mainly suffer from the added RTT (ping), which is about 100-200ms per request. So if you do not plan on having an AJAX site, I would not give the server location too much thought.

Of course, some providers might have worse connections to some international exchanges etc, but again, unless you have a large site which needs instant responsiveness, do not worry.

One thing to consider would be using a CDN, if you want to distribute larger volumes of data than 200kb / page.

 

[lewishudson325]

With today's network speed, you will see it goes smoothly unless there's major network cable problem under the sea.

 

[mikegg]

If speed is a concern for you, host it locally.

 

[SecurityTheatre]

It depends on what you mean by "overseas" too.

Hosting a server in New Zealand and using it in Canada or the UK is going to be notably slow.

The pipes between New York and London, however, are much faster and lower latency.

Worth noting...

 

[SecurityTheatre]

Hi! Back in the 90s, hosting a website in Europe when it was mostly visited by people in USA was unthinkable, as the loading times would be terrible.

But since everything runs so fast these days, does that still matter? If a website with 100-200kb of data loaded per page is hosted in Germany for example, how much of a delay is that for people browsing in America?

Also worth pointing out that it's not so much the bandwidth that's an issue (the underseas links have terabits of capacity), but the latency, which will be over 100ms, even on the fastest links.

If your page has a lot of small bits (like a bunch of .js files or a bunch of images), it will "feel" slower.

However, downloading a single big file should be pretty quick.