Best server location for India?

Where is the best server location

[Murmur]

We have a site which is serving mostly customers in India (over 80%) and we would like to find out which are the best data centre locations for the server in order to keep latency for Indian visitors to a minimum. It is expecially important as they tend to have much slower internet connections.

Note that we do not wish to keep our server in India itself, but close enough to keep the web pages being served quickly. The suggestions we have had so far include:

(1) Malaysia

(2) Hong Kong

(3) Singapore

Are any of these worth considering? I would certainly be very interested and grateful for any views on this issue.

[lammert]

Hi Murmur, first of all Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

A good starting point would be do do a ping from your location to some prime web servers in the countries you mentioned and look at the round ping time. Large ISPs or government sites are a safe choice in this test, because they are often on high bandwidth connections and their servers are probably not located offshore.

The second thing to consider is the location of the internet backbones in this area. The sea cables carrying a large part of the internet traffic to and from India are called the SEA-ME-WE cables, followed by a number. (SEA-ME-WE stands for South East Asia, Middle East and Western Europe). You can find maps of these cables using Google Image search: http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sea-me-we [google.com] A longer distance will often also result in longer communication delays.

[J_RaD]

none of those locations are going to serve very fast back to india.

why can't you host in india?

singapore would be a good starting point...then HK, malay just take it off the list.