Have you ever visited a site that takes too long to load? I have, and the longer it takes the more chance I will navigate away from it and find a faster one. This is an important thing given your main goal in the first place is to attract visitors to your site. Deciding on where you host your website can be a daunting task. There are many blogs that complain that the price hosting within Australia is expensive. I thought I would show a cost  of hosting outside of Australia, even hosting in a different city within Australia.

Ijan recently blogged about the benefits of having the right resources for your VPS and how Crucial Cloud hosting is providing its Blaze VPS product to meet these needs. – Finally a VPS with Guaranteed Performance Levels

To compliment this I have chosen to look at network performance, more specifically, latency from Australia to other countries. I have selected countries based on the number of IPv4 IP’s allocated to them. These countries make up 84.5% of the allocations.

The test:
I will be performing ping’s from Sydney to an IP  from each country and record its latency. In order to get a clearer picture, I will have that IP sent 20 ping packets and will record the Min, Max and Average Latency times. To make it simple I have written a script that performs this test and outputs the results.

The following tables are the results from my test:

As you can see from the results above. As soon as you leave Australia the latency is more than 50 times the latency than keeping it local.
Some of you may already be thinking, “your local pings must be from the same Datacenter or city”, you are correct, so I will now perform the same test for the major capital cities in Australia.

Again, even these results show that increasing the distance from your site increases the latency.

What does this mean to you?
It confirms that locating your site close to your target Audience is very important. The less distance the packets have to travel the faster you site will load to the visitor. Before moving your site to a cheaper provider, its important to investigate the true cost of the move. By saving money on your hosting, you could be decreasing the amount of visitors that stay on your site, which in turn reduces your conversion rate. I write this not as a sales pitch, but as a technology recommendation. I like having access to the best environments, and always strive to have a well oiled machine.