Website hosting in Asia

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aboylikedave

243 posts

Master Geek

#159810 13-Dec-2014 13:23

I run a website which I had hosted in the UK as it is about Premier League football scores. hidemyscore.com However, as I should have guessed, it now seems my users will mostly be based in Asia and also Australia from where load times from the UK are pretty poor.

Is there a way I can have some kind of 'mirror' for Asian users?
What are speeds from Asia to Australia like?
Or should I simply host in Asia, in which case does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks

Dave

My EPL football websites: Get the results but hide the score of your team at HidetheScore.net. Compare league positions with wage bills at RealPremierLeague.net.

achieveit

21 posts

Geek

#1196850 13-Dec-2014 13:31

Look at CDN options

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freitasm

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Geekzone

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#1196851 13-Dec-2014 13:33

Start using Cloudflare. Resources such as images, scripts and CSS will be cached by the CDN. The content itself will still come from your site (unless it's static pages in which case they can also be cached).

You register, add the domain name, load the DNS information, confirm it's correct, then change the NS settings in the domain registrar. After a bit it will start being cached from everywhere.

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timmmay

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#1196864 13-Dec-2014 13:53

If you want html cached you can use pagerules on Cloudflare. Another option is Amazon Cloudfront, it does similar to CloudFlare but you can do things like pipelining so the original html is fetched via the CDN which does help performance due to TCP optimisations. Given CloudFlare is free I'd try that first.

You can also set up some kind of a mirror in Asia, on a host or on an Amazon node. If you have two app servers running against a shared database that could be tricky.

aboylikedave

243 posts

Master Geek

#1197085 13-Dec-2014 22:16

Thanks, I'd not heard of CDN before. Some of my content comes from xml files on the server...will this be unaffected? It should always read the updated xml file.

My EPL football websites: Get the results but hide the score of your team at HidetheScore.net. Compare league positions with wage bills at RealPremierLeague.net.

itxtme

2102 posts

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#1197088 13-Dec-2014 22:31

Ultimately the slowest item to load will be the bottleneck for you users. The CDN may take care of loading 70% of a pages content faster, meaning a slow load on 30% of the content, vs 100%. How bigs the XML file, and how is it created? I would move hosting to Asiaand utilise a CDN

freitasm

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#1197105 14-Dec-2014 00:24

Moving hosts os not a light job. Start with CloudFlare as it requires no server changes.

The XML will be fine.

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timmmay

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#1197144 14-Dec-2014 08:42

You just have to tell the CDN what to cache. If you have it serve jpeg, css, gif and other files that rarely to never change it will take the load off your server (slightly) and save bandwidth. If the xml files change hourly you can set it up so they're served for an hour then it gets the updated one, but if they're constantly accessed best tell it not to cache them.

It's fairly simple to set up, just make sure to test after it's in. If you're going to set it up suggest you change your DNS TTL from whatever it is now down to say 10 minutes (600 - it's in seconds) 24 hours in advance of making the change. That way if something goes wrong you can roll back reasonably quickly rather than the site having problems for 24 hours.