Is your website target audience in India ? If 70% or more of your web traffic is from India this for you.
Why should it matter ?
If your site is hosted in US have you noticed the long delay before your webpages start appearing on the browser. While some of the other big media sites are ‘snappy’ as in they start instantly loading up. This is because of the ‘latency’ due to physical distance from the datacenter where the site is hosted.
There is a lot of performance optimization that you can do with CSS sprites ( reduces the number of image elements to load) , combining CSS files, javascript minify, concat and at the bottom apart from other Y! Slow rules.
Dedicated RAM, sufficient IOPS and fair share of CPU are some other elements that need to be in place so a web visitor to your site is not queued for several seconds before she gets her first byte of your website.
Add to it hosting in India at < 85ms latency, it gets you another level of performance boost beyond these optimizations where you can aim for snappiness that only big boys in the media industry could hope to buy till now in India. Think a 200 ms per page element saving on load times. Google's research shows it is important to reduce latency of your webpages http://code.google.com/speed/files/delayexp.pdf
A lot of Internet players in India now recognize the importance of having their websites available at a lower latency for faster response times for the end users. The latency to US/German datacenters is around 300/270 ms which translates into several additional seconds while loading up pages of websites. The big players have always chosen to host locally in India despite the high costs long associated with hosting in India.
How do I find out if my datacenter/webhosting company hosts me in India
Assuming you are in India and if you are on windows use the run dialog to open up the command prompt by typing in ‘cmd’
ping
is your friend. As an example :-
C:\Documents and Settings\Tarun Dua>ping e2enetworks.com
Pinging e2enetworks.com [180.151.0.212] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 180.151.0.212:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 81ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 51ms
Less than 100ms (milliseconds) ping round trip time is a good indicator if your webhost is located in India. More than 280 milliseconds is fairly a UK or US based host who remotely manages servers from India.
So I would really like to move to an Indian web host ?
Check out our hosting plans for dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers
on Dec 5th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
What do you say about these results
Pinging e2enetworks.com [180.151.0.212] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=257ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=257ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=200ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=127ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 180.151.0.212:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 127ms, Maximum = 257ms, Average = 210ms
on Dec 5th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Can you send us a traceroute to contact@e2enetworks.com. Our ping suggests otherwise
ping 122.161.224.197
PING 122.161.224.197 (122.161.224.197) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 122.161.224.197: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 122.161.224.197: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 122.161.224.197: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=120 ms
64 bytes from 122.161.224.197: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=108 ms
64 bytes from 122.161.224.197: icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=125 ms
— 122.161.224.197 ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 103.085/112.165/125.488/9.042 ms
Its not quite good I agree but the latency appears to be at Airtel DSLam end rather than ours
traceroute to 122.161.224.197 (122.161.224.197), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 server1.e2enetworks.net.in (180.151.0.193) 0.193 ms 0.165 ms 0.141 ms
2 203.122.32.33 (203.122.32.33) 0.636 ms 0.709 ms 0.786 ms
3 203.122.61.33 (203.122.61.33) 41.856 ms 41.810 ms 39.248 ms
4 203.122.61.66 (203.122.61.66) 46.006 ms 45.878 ms 45.852 ms
5 125.18.13.93 (125.18.13.93) 63.837 ms 63.815 ms 63.825 ms
6 203.101.100.182 (203.101.100.182) 58.671 ms 58.653 ms 58.633 ms
7 203.101.83.198 (203.101.83.198) 58.881 ms 59.058 ms 59.034 ms
8 ABTS-North-Static-150.230.160.122.airtelbroadband.in (122.160.230.150) 59.351 ms 59.525 ms 59.798 ms
9 ABTS-North-Static-213.230.160.122.airtelbroadband.in (122.160.230.213) 59.572 ms 60.245 ms 59.866 ms
on Dec 9th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I had again checked latency, it is quiet good.Please also have a look of other networks
— e2enetworks.com ping statistics —
24 packets transmitted, 24 received, 0% packet loss, time 23423ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 93.155/96.265/115.846/4.347 ms
— google.com ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4917ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 305.556/309.969/313.173/2.822 ms
— google.co.in ping statistics —
13 packets transmitted, 13 received, 0% packet loss, time 12012ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 93.497/95.772/98.732/1.502 ms
— yahoo.com ping statistics —
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5045ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 290.190/290.650/291.489/0.550 ms
— yahoo.co.in ping statistics —
7 packets transmitted, 7 received, 0% packet loss, time 6131ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 357.589/360.222/361.882/1.482 ms
on May 4th, 2010 at 9:10 am
[...] There are several hosting companies in India which have their servers in USA and thus sites hosted by these get impacted by high latencies. How to determine if your site is in USA or India. [...]