[vdance]

I did this with a few differences. It was 2004, so a few services from these days were not as "available" from a quality perspective -- particularly, VoIP. I left to France with a PSTN phone device that answered calls to my business number, and forwarded them to a French PSTN fixed phone number -- all at international rates, which were a bit more expensive back then. I did later move to a VoIP service, when the quality was reasonably acceptable.

Time differences in Asia would be different than France - maybe a few hours too many for me. I particularity loved the time difference between France and the US (~8 hours). Everyday, there was a whole day of work before my clients in the US would wake up. If needed, I could make a few calls before I had dinner and went out.

I had a 3 year established list of clients when I moved there, so that helped. A fairly stressful aspect of living abroad was that all my clients came in "locally" by way of local google advertising. And as it happens, when someone picks up the phone and calls a number that seems local to them, they tend to assume they're talking to someone who is physically present in their city.

Many clients were turned off after realizing that I was working abroad -- and not telling them (which I tried a couple times) was very strange as well -- it's just a balancing act. So my suggestion would be to get into a borderless niche business, if you can -- something like doing "websites for x" -- where a company would much rather work with someone with niche products and expertise, rather than someone local. Then the subject of where you physically are never really comes up, or makes sense. SAAS would work in that way too, of course.