I host my website and blog on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Recently I moved my hosting location from the U.S.A. to Singapore. After a few clients have asked why I moved to Singapore and not Australian based hosting I thought I may as well blog about it.
Australian Hosting costs are way too high
The headline says it all; comparing like for like, Hosting in Australia is more expensive than anywhere else. Below is what CloudFlare had to say about Australian bandwidth costs (bandwidth is costed into hosting plans and therefore the cost of bandwidth has a direct influence on hosting costs).
To give you some sense of how out-of-whack Australia is, at CloudFlare we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of Europe as we do to for Australia. That’s in spite of the fact that approximately 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million). CloudFlare
Hosting in Singapore makes a lot of financial sense as I pay about 40% less to host in Singapore than the same configuration VPS would cost in Australia. Singapore also has great data connectivity with Australia but cost isn’t everything when it comes to hosting.
Isn’t hosting in Australia best for SEO?
The location of hosting itself has no influence on SEO; with technologies such as Anycast it’s very difficult to determine where a website is really hosted and, furthermore, what difference can it possible make to a users experience where a server is located? What does affect SEO is the loading speed of webpages and this is where geography comes into play as distance does affect the load speed of pages. Serving website content from a location close to your website visitor is always best-practice.
So if serving content to visitors from a location close to them is important isn’t it best to host in Australia? Well, that depends on where your website visitors are coming from and, even more importantly, if you use a Content Delivery Network to deliver your webpages.
Website visitors come from all over the world
Below is a screen print of where the visits to my website have come from over the past 30 days (by country). Note that this excludes any visits by me to my website.
And here is where the visits have come from sorted by city.
As can be seen, visits to my website come from all over the globe. I therefore use CloudFlare as a CDN (in addition to the optimization and security they provide). By using a CDN with a global footprint my webpages get delivered from the CloudFlare location closest to the website visitor; Sydney visitors will have content delivered from the Sydney datacenter, London visitors will have content delivered from the London datacenter and so on. Because my visitors are globally distributed and my website is delivered via a CDN there is no need to pay more to host in Australia as the location of hosting becomes largely redundant.
So, should you always host offshore?
There is no simple answer as to where you should host your website as alot depends on where your website visitors come from and the needs of your website. If your website visitors are almost all from Australia and you have a small website then shared hosting based in Australia may suit your needs. If your visitors are global and your website needs a VPS then you’ll almost certainly find very good hosting based in the likes of Singapore for a far more economical price and, using the free plan from CloudFlare, you can’t go wrong.
If you need assistance in moving to a better webhost then feel free to contact me.
Great posts! Really like your experiments.
Which host are you using in Singapore, may I ask? And is it a Cloudflare optimized host w/Railfun, that offers Cloudflare Plus plan for a little extra money?
I really like how some hosts offer that Plus plan, like SiteGround. For about $12 per month on average, you get something equivalent to Cloudflare’s own $200 business plan. I’ve tried both. The $200 plan on an commerce site I help with, on a dediced box that doesn’t partner w/ Cloudflare, and the $12 Plus plan on a cheap semi-dedicated with SiteGround. They don’t seem materially different!
I think the special Cloudflare Plus plan is a great way to have a high availability site around the globe for very little money. Even ScienceDaily.com, does this, and they have awesome speed on their articles (not so great for their main page).
Reddit now uses Cloudflare, too, in large part due to their awesome honeypot. That’s actually one of the biggest benefits I’ve seen from Cloudflare — less spam on big communities. Very helpful with forums or very active blog comments section.
I’m going to experiment soon to see how Kinsta.com’s new WordPress only “Geo Loading Balanced” servers (around $400 a month, and you pick 3 locations around the globe to replicate your site) compare with Cloudflare.
As Cloudflare needs to keep calling your centralized website, whereas Kinsta literally replicates your filesystem and databases near intantly around the globe with MariaDB, I believe Kinsta will be faster and more in line with what speed freaks want.
The thing is, trouble spots like Australia. (and what a beautiful “trouble spot” it is! 🙂
I’m guessing Kinsta + Cloudflare would be ideal to get fast transit to Australia on a budget, but they’re not an optimzed partner yet. Not sure if they ever will be. I hope they also consider Fastly, which is a nextgen CDN. Really a Varnish based distributed cache for all your file types, that should (technically) beat Cloudflare, because it caches more. Sites like Lifehacker use Fastly.
Cloudflare is great, though, especially when you find a partnered “optimized” host. The only issue I see is that most Cloudflare optimzed partners I find to be very bottom of the barrel hosts, that’s the thing. A high end, fast “origin site” to feed Cloudflare would be ideal.
SiteGround is quite okay, they’re a likable exception. They also have mod_pagespeed, which you can turn to max to boost your SEO scores.
Another Cloudflare partner, Vexxhost in Montreal, actually seems quite amazing. Have yet to use them. Will probably try them out on a project. Don’t know if they offer the inexpensive “Cloudflare Plus” upgrade or not. SiteGround does.
Anyway, thanks again for the great information you share. Would love to hear what you’ve found in Singapore. I always hear about how ideal a hosting location it is for that region, but I really don’t know who’s there besides DigitalOcean. DO, unfort, I don’t believe are Cloudflare partners.
@David, I’m a big fan of Site5 VPS therefore use their hosting in Singapore.
Great article. It’s a shame there is no site that compares speeds of Australian hosters. I might try Site5 after reading your article.
You are wrong I’m afraid. The carbon print from google for instance who take up the largest data centres in the world and must be powered up 24/7 – gives an insight as to why you should always go local where possible. I run my own vps from here in Sydney and the physical server is here in Sydney. This means my audience all in Sydney will experience super fast loading times and information does not have to travel far from my database to their computer! It leaves less of a carbon print ,it is very cost effective where I pay only 20 per month and can run a hundred websites or more and I am supporting local Australian business while running my own.
Hi Charlotte,
Please clarify your reasoning; you mention that Google data centres must be powered up 24/7 and use that as an example as to why it is better to host locally. Your host will also need to have power 24/7 surely?
Hi Charlotte,
I agree with Gary, your point needs clarification. On carbon footprint, if services are consolidated this can be more efficient.