Site Performance from Russia

Website Performance when accessed from Russia

[ptietze]

My client is a global corporation, with customers worldwide. Their site is also visited by users worldwide. Their representatives in Russia indicate that the site is difficult to access and is slow. They propose an .ru version of the site to be hosted in Russia. Anyone have any experience with sites in Russia? Would an improvement in performance be expected by using a server in Russia?

[Air]

IMO why not try a small test first with a test site in Russia and the same site abroad so as to get an idea of what performance is like before making a bigger committment. I only have experience surfing to Russian sites from abroad, and performance is generally poor. With no experience within Russia I can't say for sure, but I suspect it's the transoceanic communication infrastructure to Russia that is poor, so maybe it will be faster if they are accessing a "local" server, but a test would bear that out pretty quick.