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Best LET Dedicated Servers outside North America for US Customers
GodsGiftToLET
Member
I expect to need, in 2020 and beyond, an Low End Dedicated Server outside of North America (US, Canada, Mexico), to set up a SaaS service whose 90%+ of customers will be living in the US, mostly the West Coast.
The reason for outside North America is tax related, but please keep your tax advice and taxes related comments to yourself.
What I am looking for is a trade-off between cost and quality of service for customers. My current thinking is a SoYouStart (SYS) server in France with an SSD hard drive, but I am concerned about the latency West Coast customers will experience doing their work on a server in France. I am aware that what really matters is less the physical distance, and more the number of devices the internet traffic will go through. A low end Kimsufi will actually be good enough for the SaaS service, but I strongly prefer to use an SYS and virtualization to locate both the SaaS service as well as other stuff on the same server. I want to be able to save the virtual machine on which the SaaS service is hosted so I can more easily restore the service if something goes wrong with the server or service.
If you needed a server with the above considerations, and had a budget of less than $100/month, which country/city/provider you would go with ? Is there an internet map of the world that show the distances between major cities calculated in latency between computers and servers ? Do you know of a SaaS service hosted in France that offers a free trial so that I sign up just to experience the latency for myself ?
Comments
Honestly speaking, almost any developed country will have decent links to the US. You may even find Asia competitive, as there is actually a decent amount of cheap connectivity between the US and JP, SG, TW, HK etc. Routing via Cogent or HE.net is cheap and for USA bound, not really any worse than anyone else. Latency between Asia and West Coast USA is normally quite reasonable at about 150ms. You'll probably get 200-300ms to Europe from the west coast.
I just did a quick test using HE.net's looking glass. Testing from Freemont and Los Angeles in California to HK, it's about 160ms.
Testing to Lithuania gets about 200ms.
If you can get a server in the UK from an ISP with HE.net it might be about 160 also.
HE Fremont or some Los Angeles Provider to Taiwan is about 140-150ms
I'm adding as an image since not sure how to post a table so that it'd format properly.
I'd think Japan would be your best bet.
I tested concurrent pings to a ConoHa IP (157.7.40.1) as well as a server I have at online.net.
I removed first two hops from results. Based on my results, seems like ~140ms to ConoHa from a Dallas datacenter would be possible and ~ 105ms from San Jose/San Francisco. The hops to online.net didn't resolve so neatly, alas ..
Ping tested ConoHa as it's a business I've used extensively in the past & had great experience with. This was about two years ago, though.
They have their current prices posted @ https://www.conoha.jp/en/pricing/ ..
.... I'd guess that a DC in Phoenix, AZ would have near equal latency, or slightly faster to the ConoHa IP.
ed: well, ok, mostly concurrent. ConoHa mtr had some 50 packets already when I started the online.net one.
ed2: they used to offer dedicated servers. unsure if they do anymore. but, location and price wise, Japan would have to be what you'd want, I'd think.
ed3: oh, here's what I got from a Hetzner mtr that I had left running... is interesting as it goes through Seattle instead of San Jose...
Go with a OVH Singapore server. Pretty cheap and the link to the US seems aight.
Thank you all, and more specifically Zevus, for your input. Conoha seems to be such a good deal that I signed up right away to use it for two existing web sites I already have, instead of waiting until 2020 for when I really need an offshore server.
I haven't used Conoha yet. So, this is not an endorsement. One problem I noticed when trying to sign up is neither a US credit card nor a US debit card from another bank worked for their automatic monthly payment (advertised) feature. I pre-paid with Paypal. I hope they will resolve this problem, as I don't want my web sites to stop working every time I forget to fill up my balance with them.