Poor response times in the UK for China-hosted Website

[dmjarvis]

I run a pay-per-click web marketing campaign for a client who has a website hosted in China. His website responds slowly when accessed from the UK as, apparently, the internet infrastructure between the UK and China is absolutely terrible. It appears that there is no direct connection and everything gets routed through the US. The site is hosted on a server in Hong Kong, which gives fairly reasonable download times in both China and the UK, although the download time in the UK is obviously slower than uk web surfers are used to.

Does anybody know of a telecom company or a hosting service that offers direct backbone access to East Asia from Europe? At the moment, China is their most important market anyway, so they are very reluctant to
sacrifice download speeds there for the sake of faster speeds in the UK.

Can he host the site on a European server too, and get DNS (or something) to find the most appropriate hosting site according to the visitor location?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[physics]

My guess is that there is no direct connection to China from Europe due to 'The Great Firewall of China'. Hopefully someone with experience in the Asian web will comment also though.

[bill]

You might want to look at a recent thread we had over in the Asia Pacific Forum entitled The importance of hosting Top Sites in China; Myth or Reality? [webmasterworld.com] There are some interesting tidbits in there.

You seem to have the opposite problem of most. A lot of people are trying to get their sites hosted closer to China to allow customers there to benefit from better performance. In your case you may need to look for a better host in Hong Kong that has faster connections to both sides of the net.