freitasm:

Krisando: @PenultimateHop - "Bearing that Internet is a 90% imported product in New Zealand"

There's been no initiative to expand our inter-nationwide broadband bundle, it's interesting that in-order for someone to host content for New Zealander's they have to spend overseas to get a great price and extremely fast connectivity. Un-capping, and allowing near infinite usage (much like calling someone locally) would be brilliant. Heck, wouldn't need the inter-webs.

PenultimateHop's comment that "Internet is a 90% imported product in New Zealand" is not related to local content providers hosting overseas, but the fact that most of the content consumed in New Zealand comes from overseas content providers - BBC, CNN, YouTube, Apple iTunes, Microsoft Updates, Apple Updates. Even torrents are mostly sourced from overseas. Nothing to do with local content providers going overseas to host.

International hosting of local content would add a lot of latency and user experience would be bad.

There's a good amount of national infrastructure for locally hosted content - just look at local companies using it, such as APN, Fairfax (both Stuff and Trade Me), even ourselves. There's some good peering and our national networks are quite good in terms of traffic.

We host in Auckland because 75% of our New Zealand readership is from there. Smart content providers should know where to locate their hosts. We could of course host in the U.S. for 10% of the price... But then you wouldn't get the speed we can provide. The same goes for others. There's a balance of cost and user experience.

Note that our New Zealand unique visits is only 45% of our total, but New Zealanders tend to view six to ten times more page than overseas visitors, so most of our page views are served locally. Those 75% of New Zealand page views come from Auckland, so it wouldn't make sense to host anywhere else in the country. Auckland is also good because it allows one or two hops before getting overseas to the U.S., where most of our overseas readers come from.

And we are talking over 600,000 unique visits per month. Of course Trade Me would be closer to 100% national traffic, and Trade Me alone is responsible for 60% of New Zealand web traffic every month.