Hosting in Hong Kong--Not Japan

[ReInvent]

I have a site targeted at the Japanese market and at the time it is hosted in the US. It takes for ever for my site to load in Japan and it is really hurting my site(my bounce rate is 97%)

From everything I can gather it looks like I would be better off hosting it in Hong Kong and not Japan.

My question is will Hosting in Hong Kong then Japan be that much slower? Do you think it will make a big difference?

[bill]

Hong Kong would be closer than the US which should mean fewer hops and potentially faster access times. Why not simply host in Japan if that is a concern?

[ReInvent]

Its a little easier for the ADMIN of the site if the interface is in English.

I think I might test with Hong Kong then move to Japan if it seems like Hong Kong is to slow.

[bill]

There are web hosting companies in Japan with English front ends. There aren't a lot of them, but they're there.

[Asia_Expat]

I've been looking at Hong Kong and Singapore. Most of my regular users are in Thailand and Thai international connections are a total joke. The host I am looking at require a minimum six month commitment and payment up front but the price is pretty good if I do so... I'm just concerned that I'll be lumbered with a slow connection to the site if it's not up to my expectations... however, their own company website looads really fast from my location, so it looks promising and seems that they're on a good Hong Kong backbone.

[Asia_Expat]

I've settled on a host in Hong Kong and I've decided to change my registrar also, to one in Singapore. I'm hoping this combination will improve lookup and page load speed for my Asian based users... are there any caveats you can think of?

[bill]

I hope that you're at least using a .jp domain for this site that is targeting the Japanese market. Your hosting outside Japan will be somewhat of a factor with search engines here. They may think you're targeting the Hong Kong market without that domain extension.

I've decided to change my registrar also, to one in Singapore.

I've never heard that a domain registrar has any impact whatsoever on site speed, accessibility, or anything else.