Best place to host site for Asia/Pacific

I already have mirrors in UK and US, but am wondering about Japan next...

[DamonHD]

Hi,

(My previous attempt to ask this got nuked because I invited people to SPAM the thread with self-promotional ads by mistake, so please bear with me!)

I have a bandwidth-heavy site that is mainly visited from the EU and US (about equally) and so I have mirrors in the UK and the US. However, a significant (and I think growing) portion of my traffic comes from Asia/Pacific and I'm wondering if hosting a "local" mirror is a good idea and if so where?

I have some slight experience of doing business in Japan, which might point me there, but had little luck finding real co-lo there so far.

DON'T post URLs, etc, but in general terms what would anyone suggest?

Rgds

Damon

[bill]

hmmm...mirroring an English language website in Japan might not be all that beneficial. I wouldn't expect your audience to increase significantly from Japan. There aren' that many English speakers here. Maybe basing it in an English speaking country like Singapore or Australia might be more beneficial to your users.

[Shak]

Hong Kong gets good feedback here if it's Asian traffic,

maybe Singapore or Korea?

Shak

[bill]

Korea has the same language difficulties as Japan...not many speakers. Hong Kong sounds good though.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Thanks for those thoughts.

There is / will be some limited i18n support for Japanese and Chinese in the site, though it is English-based.

Any idea of relative costs compared to the UK or US for hosting?

Rgds

Damon

[bill]

If you have local language versions of the site then I'd say it would be a wise investment to put the relative local language versions in servers in the respective countries. For example a Japanese language version hosted in Japan, a Chinese language version hosted in Hong Kong, etc. You could also look at local domains for SEO purposes.

Any idea of relative costs compared to the UK or US for hosting?

In general prices over here are more expensive. Local hosting in Japan can cost 10X more than the same package might in the US.