Website owners

[iYRe]

Not likely. 200ms on a initial web page load using TCP is beyond most human tolerances. For example, do you find Google's site slow? How about Microsoft's? I find them both load snappy to me.

To be honest, probably about 90% of the web sites I use regularly are overseas. So it's just "normal".

Well, both MS and Google deliver their content via CDN's, so chances are you're loading cached material from one of the NZ based nodes.

I just checked and www.rimuhosting.com and it is located in the US. I just checked the Microsoft Azure pricing schedule. For that amount of memory you can get 4 CPU cores, a 400Mb/s Internet Connection, and it looks like 850GB of storage.

Yep, they have US servers, also england, australia and new zealand.

I have an azure account, but since I dont use windows for webhosting (because that's just silly), and I was not convinced their linux support is all that it is cracked up to be, I didnt use it. I went to an Azure/system centre 2012 release not so long ago and couldn't get any definite answers from them about it.

Although, in saying that I just checked out a news release and a howto.. looks like its fairly easy to get centos or opensuse up and running.. I'll have to investigate and see how hard it is to get debian images up there.

[p.dath]

Well, both MS and Google deliver their content via CDN's, so chances are you're loading cached material from one of the NZ based nodes.

And when you host with Amazon or Azrure you can also use their Global CDN's as well ...

Yep, they have US servers, also england, australia and new zealand.

I have an azure account, but since I dont use windows for webhosting (because that's just silly), and I was not convinced their linux support is all that it is cracked up to be, I didnt use it. I went to an Azure/system centre 2012 release not so long ago and couldn't get any definite answers from them about it.

Although, in saying that I just checked out a news release and a howto.. looks like its fairly easy to get centos or opensuse up and running.. I'll have to investigate and see how hard it is to get debian images up there.

I just used my demo account, and when I create a VM I can choose to have it pre-provisioned with the following Linux OS's:
CentOS 6.2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Ubuntu Server 12.04
openSUSE 12.1

[iYRe]

And when you host with Amazon or Azrure you can also use their Global CDN's as well ...



I just used my demo account, and when I create a VM I can choose to have it pre-provisioned with the following Linux OS's:
CentOS 6.2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Ubuntu Server 12.04
openSUSE 12.1

hmm.. well, i'm currently using centos and debian, and I dont like centos :s Suse is not much chop for me, and ubuntu.. I dont mind it but I do prefer Debian for a production server - just more reliable updates etc..

I believe you can upload your own images, but it seems like too much work, when I could be out riding my bike :P
(ps, I used to work for maxnet.. are you the dude who ran ACE's DC b4 we bought it?)

[p.dath]

...
I believe you can upload your own images, but it seems like too much work, when I could be out riding my bike :P
(ps, I used to work for maxnet.. are you the dude who ran ACE's DC b4 we bought it?)

Yes, you can upload your own images.

Yes, I was one of the prior owner's of the data centre.

[iYRe]

ah ha.. well.. glad to meet you then :P

[scracha]

On Microsoft's Azure platform, it was about USD$35/month (about $NZD36/month). This included backups and geographically redudant storage in case Microsoft had an entire data centre fall over, or the country it was hosted in lost its connectivity, etc. It also included the Microsoft OS licencing, and backups.

On Amazon's platform it was about USD$67/month (about NZD$80/month). The Amazon offering was even better when I tested it out. It also included the Microsoft OS licencing, and backups.

Both the the above providers are *very* serious, offering levels of redudancy that you only get paying top dollar.

Hmm...we use Amazon ourselves for some webby apps hosting but that Azure price seems bloody temping. Could you clarify why it's inferior? Is it the tools available etc? Considering hosting an exchange server on Amazon but we'll be our own guinea pigs first.

OP. You pays your money for "service" as well as the actual hosting infrastructure. If you want a kiwi to ring and just do stuff ASAP it'll generally cost ya. If you want to email someone overseas and just do stuff ASAP, it generally costs less. If you're less stressed about uptime and resolving issues (cos they can happen) then you can pay much less. Hosting in NZ is expensive because sticking kit in a decent datacentre in NZ is expensive and the cost of doing business here is so stupid as to make our companies uncompetitive.

[p.dath]

Hmm...we use Amazon ourselves for some webby apps hosting but that Azure price seems bloody temping. Could you clarify why it's inferior? Is it the tools available etc? Considering hosting an exchange server on Amazon but we'll be our own guinea pigs first.

If you want to host Exchange, unless you have a lot of people, use Office 365 with Exchange Online Plan 1.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/offic...ge-online.aspx
It's about NZD$6/user/month. You get 25GB of storage per user. Don't forget this includes all your Exchange licencing, and you don't have to spend any of your time actually managing the server ...

Let me say I think Azure is good, just I think Amazon is better - but I'm thinking about using Azure myself at the moment for an app. Amazon has 50 million customizable options you can choose from. Azure caters more for 80% of the market offering only the most frequently wanted options. When I did speed tests out of Amazon I could easily get 200Mb/s. Out of Azure I sometimes struggles to get 20Mb/s. Also the Azure South East Asia cloud (Hongkong/Singapore) seems to have it's Internet gateway in the US, so you in-curr an extra 200ms of latency to do anything (hint - tell it to place your servers in the US and this problem goes away).

I must say that it is much easier figuring out what something costs in Azure as well - because there are less options to choose from ... I sometimes stare at the Amazon pricing console for ages and still can't figure out what the price would be to deploy the VM.

The other interesting thing about Azure is you can also just rent "services". For example, you can rent a SQL instance with 100MB of database storage for $5/month. So where you might have deployed a whole VM to run SQL on Amazon, you just rent the service on Azure.


For the app I am wanting to host, it is going to need less than 1Mb/s of bandwidth, and a completely standard simple Windows build with nothing complicated. So the cheaper cost of Azure is appealing.

OP. You pays your money for "service" as well as the actual hosting infrastructure. If you want a kiwi to ring and just do stuff ASAP it'll generally cost ya. If you want to email someone overseas and just do stuff ASAP, it generally costs less. If you're less stressed about uptime and resolving issues (cos they can happen) then you can pay much less. Hosting in NZ is expensive because sticking kit in a decent datacentre in NZ is expensive and the cost of doing business here is so stupid as to make our companies uncompetitive.

Let me put a different spin on it. It Amazon or Azure had an outage, and 1 million people were affected, you wouldn't need to bother to email anyone or even open a ticket. They would have every man and their dog on it. And in the virtual world, you tend to have more catastrophic failures, or none. The VM either works, or it doesn't.