Sending our Jobs to India but not our datacenters or servers

Posted on Sep 13, 2009 by Paul White

Today as I was working on my blog, I noticed a google ad that was advertising Colocation and Dedicated Servers. I just happen to be in the market for such products, so naturally I clicked the ad to learn more. What I found made ma laugh. Its obvious that the managers of the datacenter, don't have a clue when it comes to IT.

The company was NetMagic Solutions
No prices were displayed, but what was stated shocked me

	State-of-the-art datacenters located at Mumbai and Bangalore
	All hosting and co-location services backed by industry leading SLA's
	Round the clock security at different levels
	High speed redundant Internet connections
	Regulated air conditioning system
	Automated fire detection and alarming systems
	World class 24x7x365 NOCs' at all locations
	Helpdesk available to swiftly resolve and attend customer calls

Now in the first item, Notice where their state of the art datacenters are?

Mumbai

and

Bangalore

Inida.
Now anyone who has ever used google adwords to advertise their business, knows you can select what region you want to target. So for me to see this ad means they were targeting customers in the USA

For a company that has a customer base in India this might be a great place to colocate your servers. But if you run a bunch of web servers, and your customer base is located in the USA, then the last place you would want to setup your servers is india.

Want Proof, I present the tracert

tracert from Houston to netmagicsolutions in India

tracert from Houston to netmagicsolutions in India

342ms ping time.

Any gamer will know what a 342ms ping time means. It means you are about 2 seconds from getting banned from the server. No clan will accept you because you slow down the whole server.

The biggest companies know that people are impatient. Speed is vital to their business. This is why google has multiple data centers all over the USA.

So if at your next board meeting one of the VPs suggests they move the company servers to india for colocation, use this little fact to conquer the moment. However if there comes a day when we get enough fiber laid between the USA and India, this could mean some nasty competition for USA based data centers. When it comes down to it what matters is your ping times to your customer base. Some companies might actually colocate their servers in India if the ping times were just as fast as when colocated locally. But most web developers like me are control freaks. We like the power of being able to visit our server in the local datacenter on occasion. One of my buddies has a Security pass to the Houston Level 3 datacenter. This pass not only gives him 24/7 access to his server, but status among his peers ( Other computer guys ).

Update on my own server

The Server has been ordered, and will be here by the end of the week.
I have decided to go with Acronoc.com for colocation.
Initially their ping times of 50ms were slightly disappointing considering they are a local company, but there were still faster than Godaddy. After testing their network by calling some friends out of state and having them ping their network, I was impressed. 14ms ping from Omaha to Houston. Granted this is Omaha which has a ton of fiber due to its proximity to Offutt Air Force Base, which was a central base during the cold war. Anyway back on topic
Acronoc's prices were awesome. And they don't nickle and dime you. I get the feeling the company is run by a guy similar to me in both age and mind set. On his blog he cares about the same stuff I do ( photography, cars, computers, websites ). Its a smaller company which means they value their customers even more. I look forward to meeting the guy, when I take my server in for colocation

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Karthik | Oct 25, 2009 1:51 PM
Tracert

Ping

What you say now, if my VP tells me to host our apps at some US datacenter i would say no of course, with my 10Mb/s line i can reach any datacenter in India within 100ms.

now I have 7 1U SuperMicro server at TATA's datacenter a.k.a "Teleglobe" i don't see any problems with it. well Acronoc is good, i hope they provide good support to you :), btw your PC looks awesome :)

Paul | Oct 26, 2009 5:35 AM
Karthik,
If you are based out of India, and your customer base is out of India ( or a country nearby ) then of course a datacenter in India would be best. But for any company that is targeting USA customers, they would be better served colocating their servers in a USA based datacenter. Your Ping times are a result of doing a ping from your location ( in India ) to Acronoc ( based in the USA ). The point of the article is that long pings will negatively affect your website's performance, and this is common when serving content to IPs that are geographically distant.

Thanks for the positive feedback on my PC.

Karthik | Oct 27, 2009 10:46 PM
Hey Paul,

I understand and I agree your theory is absolutely correct back in 2003 or 04 i used have GoDaddy Shared account i used to feel like site is very slow, i was some what may be technically dumb at that time didn't knew the actual reason for that :D , but yeah for US customer colocating server US Datacenter is a better option, there are lots of good stuff i learn't here in this blog keep up the good work mate.

You have a lot of good stuff in your blog, I'm just curious to find a cheap SuperMicro at eBay, gimme some tips ;)

Paul | Oct 27, 2009 11:22 PM
Karthik,
Search ebay for "1U Server SuperMicro". The best deals are with sellers with no / little feedback. You take a risk buying from them, but its worth the risk, just use paypal so you are protected. Also get creative with your searching. New Sellers will not properly name their auctions, resulting in low exposure. Sometimes you can find real gems, in these auctions where people don't know how to describe the items. This might take paging through 100 pages of servers, but the result is you can get 1U rack servers that are only a couple years old for under $200.

Karthik | Oct 27, 2009 11:57 PM
Paul,

Thanks mate i would have saved a lot of money if i got some servers at eBay, well i'm new to eBay because i never trusted eBay and I'm very noob at it, problem is there are lots of people who don't ship to my country(which is India), so i'm kinda stuck right now :( can you give your mail address?

Donn Edwards | Apr 13, 2010 1:22 PM
Dear Paul

After my experience with WebHost4Life in the USA I think I'd prefer to be hosted in India. I have never encountered a more disastrous bunch of clowns in my life.

What's your ping time to fishwisepro.com ? Their servers are slow I'm tearing my hair out.

Can you recommend a hosting company that can reach a global audience without overloaded servers?

Paul | Apr 13, 2010 1:41 PM
Donn,
I honestly have not bee able to find any companies providing fast shared servers. The ping times are going to depend on many factors. Physical distance between clients and servers, How loaded the server is, and how fast the client's ISP is. I am with Comcast ( Cable Modem ). Since I am sitting 20 miles from my server I get about 19 ms ping times. My sister on the other hand up in Omaha, Ne gets about 14ms pings to my server ( this has to do with the large amount of fiber running through omaha to support SAC Air Force Base ). With Godaddy ( in Phoenix ) I would get about 55 ms ping times. Hostmysite.com, and hosting.com ( Newark ) I get 69 ms to 72 ms. I pinged your domain and got 62 ms ping times which are average. If your customer base is in India then yes it would be beneficial to have your website hosted there. My pings to India are usually 500ms+. The only way to get fast global website hosting is to use a CDN ( Content Distribution Network ). They basically host your website on many servers around the globe. This is what many large scale websites, and adult sites use to ensure they can provide a quality experience for their visitors no matter where in the world they are. I personally have not needed to use a CDN, but I hear they are expensive, so be prepared to pay for that performance.

I honestly gave up on shared hosting, and just got my own server, and colocated it with Acronoc ( datacenter in downtown houston ). My hosting bill is currently about $90 / month, for 500 Gigs. I have had it there for over 6 months without any issues. If you are serious about doing it right, and you have the know how to run your own server, I highly recommend Acronoc.com

Impulseweb | Dec 9, 2010 2:40 AM
Yes, its true that no USA company will host the website in India due to High Ping times. There are many companies who need server in India to monitor their USA server or some work where they put up a server in India in their cluster or cloud. WE operate at 6 data center in India . We have almost 30 % customers from USA. They dont host there corporate website in India. They get a server from us for there Indian customer etc.

Cost of datacenter and Network is still high in India. Only skilled people are available in large number at low cost.

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