[rkalla]

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a host with a nicely spread out global presence?

I am aware of the big players (AWS, Linode, Softlayer, RimuHosting) but they all seem to have shortcomings that don't make anyone particularly ideal and I'd love to avoid a combination of all if I could.

I am looking to minimize network latency and maximize disk space with memory and CPU being secondary concerns. More or less think CDN edge location requirements.

For example:

  AWS - Speed to China and AUS/NZ from the Singapore region 
  is subpar. Speed to Japan from Singapore is much worse 
  compared to the Tokyo region directly. Managing many  
  images in many regions across the AWS stack can be time 
  consuming.

  Linode - Their CA datacenter (hosted by HE) has a terrible 
  reputation and uptime. I love that they normalize their 
  bandwidth pricing across all data centers though. Disk 
  space is an issue for us (media distribution).

  Softlayer - Looks solid, nothing for the AUS crowd or 
  Japan/Chinese users.

  Voxel - Not cheap, again nothing for AUS/NZ crowd.

  RimuHosting - Doesn't buy enough in EU/AUS to offer budget 
  bandwidth pricing, the London bandwidth is horrifically   
  expensive.

  JoyentCloud - Single data center at this time.

These are all nit-picks, each of these services are great and I've hosted with them at different times and been very happy (other services like SliceHost and VPS.NET have been bad/very-bad - respectively) but I am curious if I am missing a single host that could meet most of these requirements that I just don't know about yet?

For example, I had never heard of BurstNET or BHost or A Small Orange until reading this thread... so I'm hoping I might be missing some fantastic host somewhere with medium/large VPSs or small/medium dedicated solutions.

[nl]

Rackspace's CDN (used for Rackspace Files) is Akamai.

This is orders of magnitude better than Singapore for AUS/NZ.

Actually, for some people in AUS, West Coast US will be better than Singapore because some ISPs (eg TGP) route via the US to save money. [1][2]

Edit: Of course, Amazon are supposed to be launching EC2 (or just a CDN node?) in Australia sometime soon.

[1] http://akb.id.au/2011/amazon-ec2-latency-australian-soil (look at the Melbourne latency to Singapore)

[2] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=45867

[rkalla]

Nick, I really appreciate the info and the links -- didn't know about the AUS gossip buzzing around AWS, that is excellent news.

[dotBen]

Well to be clear, this post is examining Budget VPS's (aka "Low End Boxes"), ie <$10/m.

You can use LEB's to get a good geo-spread if you need to do network topography examination, ping/traceroute/looking-glass from multiple nodes, etc.

If you are hosting media, not sure a LEB is the right choice for you.

[inopinatus]

Since you seem concerned (as I am) about AUS/NZ performance, it's worth repeating the unconfirmed gossip that Amazon have a closed tender out for a pair of Sydney data centers.

Ninefold are also in Sydney and doing a good marketing job, and I know several first-class engineers that have been involved in their setup and have made only positive remarks on their potential (with the usual caveats around Australian market scale being an issue).

[bigiain]

I'm cautiously hopeful about Ninefold, but keep in mind they had some serious (multiple day) downtime a month or so back. I'm sure they'll get on top of their operations soon enough, hopefully before Amazon becomes the local gorilla-in-the-corner in the local market...

[organico]

There are others outside of Sydney too - OrionVM, Dynomesh / Serversaurus off the top of my head.

[mogston]

I wouldn't class Voxel.net as budget, but their low VPS is affordable, and based on my own experiences very reliable. They're very pro-active at alerting you to issues, even without their managed service.

[sorenbs]

Depending on access pattern you could use linodes to serve most active content and dump the rest to s3.