South East Asia data centres

Abhi

We all know that the hosting industry is mainly depending on the US and its laws to exist and survive. Europe has a decent share too. Outside these domains, there is no hosting industry. There are a few companies which offer Singapore location, some offer Mumbai and Bangalore. These are very limited and are the only option for visitors from Asia where almost half of the world's population live.

Won't it be more affordable if the hosting companies choose South East Asia as their hub ? There is a lot of foreign investments in China and India. So the environment is already in favour of people who plan to invest in the region.

Another factor is that it is really cheap to run a business in these countries when you consider the salary offered. A lot of people from South East Asia is already working remotely in the web hosting industry. Considering the fact that Chinese phones cost 1/4 of that of Samsung, hosting package rates would fall by at least 50 % if S.E.A rise as a hosting industry hub.

phenomlab

Abhi what you're not taking into consideration with using South East Asia is that it won't work well enough for anyone in the EU or US because of the latency. From the UK, the RTT is around 250ms to Asia and even higher from the US. This alone would make it impractical from the speed and lag experience alone.

The primary way to work around the latency issue is to use a CDN provider who has a presence in the location you're looking to address. The server itself would remain on US or EU soil.

Abhi

phenomlab won't work well enough for anyone in the EU or US because of the latency.

People in South East Asia are using the US servers mainly. I can tell you that there is no degraded performance in most cases.

I always thought that South East Asia or the Middle East is much closer to Europe than the US. Imagine when people have to pay only half the price, those who are on a tight budget will choose a cheaper option and compromise just like Asian customers do at the moment.

phenomlab

Abhi there is no degraded performance in most cases.

I can tell you otherwise 😁. I run a multi country network using VPNS and if I place a resource in Singapore for example then access it from London it'll be unusable in most cases because of how slow it is. Http traffic streams are a little different in the sense that you can use compression techniques, but place a 10mb video on a server in Singapore then try to access it from London and you'll instantly see what I mean.

This is why CDN technology was created to address this very issue. Latency in wide area networks is something I deal with on a daily basis and have done for 28 years plus. The reason why you do not see degradation in speed is purely because of the usage of CDN or websockets technology. HTTP/2 makes a lot of difference in most cases.

The US also has undersea transatlantic cable which is using OSPF as a routing protocol to work out the shortest distance for traffic to pass through.

The US is closer to Europe than the Far East. It takes 8 hours to reach NYC by plane from London, and 14 hours plus to reach Singapore from the same origin.

Abhi

Well, around half of the world population is living with it. So it can't be that bad, right ? Plus you get 50 % discount on your hosting bill. Sounds like a deal to me.

phenomlab

Abhi yes, but see the packages on offer. They all bundle cloudflare as a CDN if not their own or via a partner agreement

Abhi

I have personally used a couple of hosting packages without a CDN. Mostly for WordPress. The website used to load fine for me. But that is http/https traffic as you mentioned. Gaming servers are not good when they are in the US or Europe.

But it remains a fun fact that there is no hosting industry at all in these countries that cater to the local needs. All those benefits are not available to a wide community of people in this world. Let what exist in other parts of the world remain as is. There is enough demand for local servers in South East Asia.

Sometimes I feel that it is the existing markets that prevent the adoption of hosting friendly policies by South-East Asian countries. While a lot of people are talking about their jobs being stolen, market monopoly and the right to run a business are often contained by the world powers. ie, you get the jobs, but the business and huge profits that come with it go to the countries which dominate the world scene. And nobody talks about it.

phenomlab

Abhi But it remains a fun fact that there is no hosting industry at all in these countries that cater to the local needs

Are you completely sure about this statement ?

Singapore
https://www.vodien.com/web-hosting/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=cid|682384531|search&utm_content=gid|98912798109|aid|427243885905|placement|&utm_term=website%20hosting%20singapore

Others

https://www.ecommerceasean.com/best-website-hosting-for-asean-business/

Statement from the above website

Is the location Of Web Hosting Important For Business In Asia?
Yes, 100%! The location of the website hosting servers is very important, because the closer a person is located to your server, the quicker you can deliver the information to them. Speed is so important to the success of your website.

From that statement alone, each of these hosts is using CDN clusters in the Asia region to speed up traffic. That, coupled with HTTP 2 and traffic shaping / compression gives you the speed boost for visitors arriving from outside your country

Abhi

There is a difference between a global hosting provider offering CDN or a server location in Asia and parts of Asia having its own hosting industry. If someone is willing to start a data centre today in India, Srilanka or Indonesia, what are their chances ? The cost of a Mumbai or Bangalore based location is high when compared to what you get when you choose the popular locations, which is the US or Europe. The manpower is cheap, but the import duty on hardware, the amount required to get the facility setup and claim proper license etc are not small.

If you see, the decision is more or less political. The governments in these countries are not into making allowances for the hosting industry to thrive. Otherwise, look at the price of land in Europe for a data centre and that in Bangladesh which has a very stable government in last decade. Please don't assume that these governments are not in practice of supporting companies/corporates. You will see that sometimes certain politicians are very generous in this regard.

I would anytime go for a Colombo or Dhaka location if they are of the same standard by those provided by companies like Digital Ocean. But it won't happen in the near future because sometimes it is not easy to take on a competition when they are from a politically stronger nation.

phenomlab

Abhi I can't agree with this. Hyderabad for example has a huge data centre facility - see https://www.dailyhostnews.com/best-data-center-service-providers-in-india

In addition, it's not a political decision as to may think. Much of India for example is still way behind in terms of carrier technology which is very unreliable. We have an offshore consultancy company in Mumbai that performs functions for the firm I work at and their connection capabilities leave a lot to be desired.

I don't think I can comment further here.

Abhi

phenomlab Much of India for example is still way behind in terms of carrier technology

Does carrier technology mean FTTH, ADSL etc ?

India ( I am no ambassador ) has nationwide 4G since last two years and is already working on moving to 5G. 1GB of 4G data costs $2 from the no.1 player. As for wired, if you are willing to pay, even home users can get something between 50 Mbps to 1 Gbps FTTH. A leased FTTH line can be easily obtained in industrial areas and IT parks.

phenomlab Hyderabad for example has a huge data centre facility - see

Please don't fall for the 10 -15 high class corporate data centres. All of us know that for a hosting industry, the difficulty to host data centres need to be much less.

admin

I like the idea where the bills are going to be a lot less than it is now. Let us hope that it will be like that one day. 🙂

Manishchowdary

India shares 9% of the data market in terms of the capacity of holding data. Now in 2020, India is trying to develop the significant Data Centre business.

With growing digital consumption patterns such as online gaming, online education, streaming, e-commerce India holds enormous potential to become the ‘next destination’ for data centres.