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I live in Australia and was wondering if I should buy a VPS from a local host or someone overseas as we don't have the greatest internet speeds here.

Are there countries you would prefer to host your servers in for the benefit of their connection speeds?

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closed as too localized by Mark Henderson Jan 12 '12 at 5:50


what are you talking about?!?! the govt has promised us NBN. we'll all have fiber to the node baby! –  Nick Kavadias Jul 15 '10 at 5:23
Pft, in 8 years time. Unless you live in Brunswick (Melbourne) or Toowoomba, they get it first. I used to live near Toowoomba. Why did I move? Maybe I'll move to Kiama, they're in line for it soon. –  Mark Henderson Jul 15 '10 at 5:43

4 Answers 4

What you can get at home != what a datacenter hosting your VPS has available. You should be fine getting a VPS from a host local to you.

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So there would be no benefit (speed wise) in choosing an offshore VPS host? –  Frank Jul 15 '10 at 4:50
It would probably be slower since you have more hops to travel to get to it. –  Zypher Jul 15 '10 at 4:55
that's fine in theory but doesn't pan out in practice in Australia. A few extra hops to a much faster host gives us better performance than a local host with crappy bandwidth on oversold pipes. –  John Gardeniers Jul 15 '10 at 5:44

I'd tend to think that you should be worried about the bandwidth between the intended clients and the VPS. If your intended clients are mostly in .AU it would make sense to get a VPS located in Australia. Who do you intend to be clients?

If you targeting the world as potential clients, I'd probably start with a server located somewhere outside of Australia. As you scale up you can make the decision to obtain geographically varied hosting (and whatever technical mechanism you want to use to distribute clients-- GeoDNS, etc) to spread clients around the various hosting sites efficiently.

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much more complete answer compared to mine! this is why you're uber Evan! Fast, complete and concise answers! –  Nick Kavadias Jul 15 '10 at 5:00
The clients will be from Australia, so yes, a .AU VPS host would mean less hops. However, one of the websites will be hosting videos. If 100 people are streaming 200MB videos at the same time, I don't want me AUS VPS crashing because those 100 people are killing my bandwidth. Would this be a concern? –  Frank Jul 15 '10 at 5:06
@Frank: That's more of a CDN-type concern. No matter where you put a server somebody will be across a skinny pipe. Multiple, geographically distributed sites is your answer to that problem. –  Evan Anderson Jul 15 '10 at 5:14

It all depends on where your customers are. If you're customers are in Australia, then a VPS in Australia will have better response times than if your hosting else where.

Also, you may want to stick with local currency. Depending on the cost, it may be a 'business risk' if your hosting bills go up & down at the whim of the exchange rate. Which also begs the question, if you hosting in another country does that mean you can buy software licensing by pricing in that country? MS are notorious for 'fixing' pricing in different countries! Should we move all our hosting to china to get cheaper licensing? probably not.

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Womble might disagree with me here, but Australia does have pretty shitty datacentre uplinks, and to get a good one it costs a lot of money. Which means that a decent VPS hosted in Australia is going to cost you a lot more than getting one hosted in the US.

That said though, if you're running something that's latency dependant (like, streaming videos) then you need to go for as few hops as possible, which means that you should be getting a physical location as close as possible to your customer base.

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+1 I couldn't agree more. –  John Gardeniers Jul 15 '10 at 5:40
Only one site out of many will be streaming video so latency shouldn't be too bigger issue. Your thoughts on AUS datacentre uplinks is what I was thinking. I did some searching for recommended VPS providers here on serverfault and linode.com seem pretty good. Guess I should start weighing up the pros and cons of offshore hosting. –  Frank Jul 15 '10 at 5:43