Where do you host your servers?
Hey,
I am planning to go live in a months time. For a monitoring solution - instancebeat, latency time is kind of crucial. I am kind of positive that my fellow indiedevelopers might have gone through similar latency issues.
Which country do you prefer for hosting your web application so that latency time can be kept minimal?
I use DigitalOcean for smaller websites and side project MVP's. But for any sites that become successful or have a reasonable following, I will convert them to AWS Elastic Container Service. This allows me to make them infinitely scalable and load balanced.
Your query is on which country/location to choose as server location rather than hosting service,right ?
If yes,then I can say that it depends on your audience location.
I host mine at kinsta and recently after observing the latency time ,also my major audience is from asia and america.
So basically i'm okay if europe is delayed a bit,keeping this as criteria I have shifted to tokyo(japan).
Probably you need to use one of these below to figure out:
Thanks for the pointers.
German hosting also very good price https://www.hetzner.com/
I can't stress how good Hetzner Cloud is. It's basicly DigitalOcean but you actually get some decent performance for your money
Particularly Hetzner Cloud: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
A lot of the basic features of AWS VPC/EC2, and full support in Terraform, but at a fraction of the price. Can choose to host in either Germany or Finland.
I use hetzner cloud for my staging server. Not sure whether to use it for production.
Assuming there are no regulatory considerations (big assumption!) then host it in the region where most of your users are. If they're spread widely over the world, go with US datacenters, as the prices are usually better. Also you may find faster networking throughput associated with certain server types within a given cloud provider.
Oh great. Frankly, I am looking at somewhere in Europe. I will check with US Datacenters. Who is your cloud provider?
I've used AWS so far but I'd like to try Azure. Tends to be slightly more expensive, though.
And of course if you have images or a lot of JS or CSS, hosting them on a CDN will ensure they're not too far from end users and cut down on some latency and loading time.
I use Hetzner Cloud an UpCloud, happy with both of them.
Haven't tried UpCloud. I have read that there are some reliability issues with UpCloud. Not sure.
I can't remember any downtimes in 3+ years... Sorry for the late reply :)
I am using dokku on Scaleway. Cheap solution, and can easily migrated to more premium services when projects become big enough
If you just need a VPS and are looking for cheap / in Europe, also check out OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/de/vps/.
How do you compare it with Hetzner? I haven't tried ovhcloud but read some good reviews about that.
I have only used Hetzner for backup storage, but I think they are quite similar. They both don't have the most polished interface. One difference in their offering is networking - OVH limits the bandwidth, whereas Hetzner limits the total traffic.
Thanks .
Like others have mentioned, reducing latency for your users really depend on where your users are located. However without some sort of database sharding or defining your own regions, you'll see latency between your DB and the API if they aren't on the same server. My advice would be to host where your users are, and don't over optimize on API latency.
My servers are on DigitalOcean for VMs and Google Cloud for fully managed stuff. Both US in the US in SC, NY, or Iowa
I recently move from DigitalOcean to Contabo (https://contabo.com/?show=vps), the price is unbeatable (when you look closer DO is very expensive).
As some people suggest AWS is really great, but it is premium hosting and not cost effective for idea validation (you don't have to worry about scaling at this stage).
My current setup is 1 server in USA and 1 server in Europe (both fo $11 at Contabo) + backup to AWS 3 (basically free for infrequent usage).
This is the first time I am hear about contabo. I will give a try.
I'm also a DO client but Contabo pricing and features look great. I'll definitely look into that, thanks!
AWS. A bit more expensive than competitors but if you are targeting worldwide then you can also use latency-based routing to route a user to the best-latency region
I'm using Linode in the US-East region given that most of my users are from the US.
Super happy with Linode so far. I switched from DigitalOcean given that Linode has a better backup story.
I love linode. I am a great fan of linode because they run their business without investors ;)
Hi,
Where will the users be ?
The best would be to use some kind of CDN so that you can reach people globally as close to their location. Cloudfront from AWS is one of them.
Just in case you need support we offer Cloud consultancy.
Google cloud western europe
European hosting, Netherlands, Iceland
At the moment I am tending to favor towards europe based data centers even if they are a bit more pricey (only a tiny bit) just because of the GDPR implications if you have any users from europe. as well as the recent Schrems 2 ruling.
However, if you can be 100% sure you have 0 european users, then I'd go with the US.
Wait, why would GDPR affect server location? Isn't it mostly about how, and what data you store, rather than where?
It's about where you transfer it to, too. Chapter 5 of GDPR.
Oh. I didn't know about that.
Oh interesting, I might want to move my new server then :O Most of my stuff is already in Europe but for a new project I chose US, since I expect majority of the users coming from there, not everybody though.
Quick skimming of that chapter sounds like they are talking about transferring to third parties though.
Don't forget that AWS / cloud providers are considered a third party processor and therefore your responsibility
Would imagine most IH'ers would use transfer to a 3rd party processor for much of their data storage and manipulation.
Our 3rd party processor is AWS, so we'll always look to use in the EU region.
Jus to tack on to this - there was also a recent case (Schrems 2) which invalidates the Privacy shield as well https://www.eversheds-sutherland.com/global/en/what/articles/index.page?ArticleID=en/global/ireland/schrems-ii-judgement-170720
Oh interesting, thanks for the heads up. AWS eu-west-1 here I come :D Haha. Thankfully it shouldn't be much of an issue to move the only project I got hosted in the US.
If latency is a major sell in your service, you should serve it from multiple countries so the people in each country can get the best latency.
I agree with you. But, when if are just starting and not sure about the customer base, wouldn't it be expensive?
I got free credits from AWS, and Digital Ocean.
Great. Which country did you choose?
US East Virginia
Thanks.