[burntcaramel]

As an Australian, I agree that I usually prefer when a service is hosted nearby. Yet… 200ms latency, that’s pretty good actually. For some real data, I just tried `ping ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` and time is 240ms. That’s in Tasmania, NBN over Wifi. I’m happy with that!

But the problem, like many of the other commenters are saying, is for a single request us-east-1 is actually fine. But for a modern web app but many requests, that compounds real quick. I actually think living here is an advantage as a web developer because it’s like those athletes that only train at high altitudes — living in a high latency environment means you notice problems easily.

[sgt]

That puts things into perspective for us in South Africa*. My RTT to Europe is about 170-180ms. It used to be a bit better, not sure what happened. But the point is that it's just barely within what I would consider "fast" in relation to Europe.

(*) Similar to AU, we're also in the middle of "nowhere"