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What is considered an "Exotic location"?
ServerBachelor
Member
Obviously there will be different definitions, but what's the consensus? I've always thought of an "exotic location" as one where few low-end providers tend to set up shop, due to higher costs for bandwidth, political/economic instability, or low demand due to high latency to the populated areas of the world.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of locations I consider "very" to "not" exotic. I've probably missed some, and there are probably locations that people will disagree with. Note that I don't draw a hard line anywhere.
- Most Pacific islands, Iran, Libya and other North African countries, Chinese mainland, anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkmenistan, Antarctica
- Belarus, Russia, most of Central and South America, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Central Asian countries, other Arab Gulf States, Balkan states, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South and Southeast Asia, most Middle Eastern states besides Iran
- Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, UAE, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Australia, New Zealand, Baltic states, Scandinavian countries, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria
- Belgium, Luxembourg, Moldova, Romania, UK
- Netherlands, Germany, France, United States, Canada
Comments
I would place UK into the fifth category
Russia is nowhere exotic, I don't think I even have fingers to count the amount of cities I have servers on
.
You can easily get VPSs in China if you pass KYC with any big provider, or are a citizen.
Iran kinda the same thing, most providers ask for KYC, but no one has a server there besides Iranian citizens to bypass censorship.
Exotic: a city with fewer than three data centers.
Personally "exotic" to me is locations that generally have poor connectivity, so they're harder to find commercial servers in. In your list, probably the pacific islands and central Africa.
Nice point.
Fair enough. It's relatively easy to get servers in Russia/Iran etc. if you buy from a medium/big company operating out of one of those countries, or a friendly country.
I did state in the post that I consider "exotic" to mean few small/low-end providers, and I can imagine that it'd be a bit of a hurdle to get approval as a basement host to start selling services internationally from, say, China.
I would add the entirety of Africa into the first category
Shame but what can you do, we are still stuck in the 1800s
Here in Ecuador where I live each 1U in a halfway decent datacenter costs between $180-$200, and they barely give you 100Mbps network speed in 2: 1, it is very difficult to have servers here because of colocation costs, some years ago with my ex boss we had servers in our offices paying an internet service and renting the IPs to our ISP, and there we had a 1Gbps network, but if the power went out the problem, as I understand they already have energy redundancy but only use them for their projects and their customers, nothing open to the general public to host there.
Interesting take, I guess exotic just means less common, not necessarily bad.
excuse me?
Connectivity is awful in almosts everywhere in africa.
1800s= telegram copper lines
Your listing is pretty fair.
Category 5 is really the "super centers" where the locations are drowning in datacenters. Even within these centers, though, there could be exotic locations. e.g., US if you mean Dallas or New York? Super common. Alaska or Hawaii on the other hand are very rare.
I would move Singapore to #4. Lots of LowEnd providers offering service there. And probably Moldova to #3.
Dedi running Red Star OS 4.0
I'm from Brazil, and currently our entire infrastructure is based in Miami due to how difficult things are in Brazil.
The main issue in Brazil is access to hardware. Server-grade equipment is practically unavailable for purchase in the country, and when it is, the prices are extremely high. Importing is also complicated, on top of the bureaucracy, taxes can double the cost. A server that costs around $2,000 USD in the U.S. can easily end up costing $4,000 USD if you import it, and if you choose to buy from local vendors, the price can exceed $10,000 USD.
Because of that, I see many data centers in Brazil relying on desktop-class solutions, especially standard NVMe SSDs. I've also seen some using those Chinese "Xeon X99" servers sold on AliExpress.
In my opinion, this difficulty in accessing quality hardware at a fair price is the main factor holding back the growth of the sector in Brazil.
But Amazon is in San Paolo.
I guess it depends on the perspective. From a public cloud perspective, Uruguay is not exotic because Google is there. From a LowEnd perspective, it definitely is.
From the perspective of AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, yes, they are present in Brazil, but availability is still far more limited compared to typical locations like North America or Europe. Even then, services in places like Brazil tend to be more expensive.
From a LowEnd perspective, smaller companies or early-stage projects without major funding simply don’t have the same resources as Amazon or Google. That’s why I pointed out how difficult it is to build infrastructure in Brazil, even if you have the capital to invest, options are still quite limited.
In Brazil, the main infrastructure hubs are São Paulo, Fortaleza, and Rio de Janeiro. There are also smaller regional data centers in cities like Campinas, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Brasília, and Belo Horizonte, but those tend to offer less connectivity and come with higher operating costs.
Good catches! It’s true, a lot of datacenters in the US are in or around pretty major metropolitan areas. One LE provider who targets less common areas is @MannDude, though I only have his Kansas City and Washington locations atm.
fine
South Africa is great
Except south africa and and laos.
This is a good list in general. I would move Poland, Singapore and Austria a bit higher.
Regarding the rarest locations it will be the ones were foreigners are not allowed to host anything - DPRK, Turkmenistan, Nicaragua, China. For Libya - there's libyanspider, I've also seen a few providers in Tunisia and Egypt. Not to say it isn't rare but I would put North Africa a bit higher.
For Iran there're quite a few providers however they're pretty expensive and unavailable for international purchase usually.
Post offices have tabulated charts of international shipping tariffs, each tariff is a column, numbered 1 to 8, from "less exotic" territories ($) to "more exotic" territories ($$$), to "not even listed on the table" (???) kind of exotic. The ??? category is so exotic in fact, that no postal service is even operational in those territories. Definitely this is a good take on measuring exoticism, if you are content with discrete integer numbers.