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I am going to make my website live on AWS servers and 100% of intended website audience will be from India only. As amazon offers you to get services from various zones, I was wondering is there any substantial difference in performance and page fetch time if I choose my server to be in North Virginia or in Asia Pacific?

I have read somewhere that more the server is near a client's computer, more fast the webpage loads on his machine. As number of hops between client's machine and server gets reduced.

If that is the case then Amazon offers three places in Asia Pacific(Singapore, Tokyo, Sidney) out of which Asia Pacific(Singapore) is the nearest place near India. Should I take server in Singapore only or I can choose any location?

Please suggest me?

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  • 1
    It should cost you only a few US cents to start a VM in each region and test it for yourself. Jan 13, 2013 at 6:28
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    @MichaelHampton: Yeah, that could be the last option I have, but still I am looking for suggestions from people already having experience with such things.
    – Abhinav
    Jan 13, 2013 at 6:29
  • Any suggestions?
    – user21904
    May 4, 2016 at 8:43
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    @user21904: Singapore region is best in terms of latency if your target audience is from India. I have run several test in past 3 years and eventual result is this.
    – Abhinav
    May 4, 2016 at 9:11
  • Here's a console tool that shows the closest aws region for the host where it was run github.com/ekalinin/awsping
    – shorrty
    Sep 22, 2016 at 12:17

4 Answers 4

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I am running a website whose traffic is totally from India only and tested various options.

If the traffic is from India only, just go for Singapore Zone in Asia Pacific region.

The latency from their is minimum and will vary somewhere around 70-120ms (measure from Delhi, India).

Though you would have to pay some extra bucks comparative to N. Virginia Region, but it's worth it.

The latency from N. Virginia region will be somewhere around 250-350 ms.

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  • If we use Akamai (which has pretty decent edges in India) would be a good idea to host it at Virginia? Keeping in view the cost?
    – Ut xD
    Nov 21, 2014 at 5:19
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    Well, if you are looking for cost, yes. But at the same time, it depends what service of akamai you are using and what type of content you have, like if you have lots of dynamic content, and you aren't using akamai dynamic caching, it won't help much. I believe you got my point. If you have dynamic content, and want to host site in N. Virginia, you should go for dynamic caching. For sure there will be some difference comparative to Singapore, but if your usage is high, your cost will be less.
    – Napster_X
    Nov 21, 2014 at 10:10
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The Amazon AWS availability zones are listed here. This list can be updated at any time, so this is a snapshot.

enter image description here

If you're serving traffic to India, it makes sense to place your systems in the Asia Pacific availability zone, if for no reason than latency. The path to Northern Virginia is far more complex, and you'd be bypassing the European Union region, which would be a better choice than anything in the United States.

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  • Just an FYI: That's a map of AWS regions, not availability zones. Each region is composed of 2 - 5 availability zones.
    – jamieb
    Jan 14, 2013 at 0:45
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AWS now have a region on Mumbai.

I am performing the same tasks as you, where the traffic is 100% from India. I have chosen Ireland over Mumbai/Singapore/Sydney because Ireland has more AWS services available. For example, if I want to use EFS, none of the Asia Pacific regions offer it, also Developer services like CodePipeline is not available in Mumbai.

You can use Mumbai in the entirety, provided you use the equivalent services (like S3FS or GlusterFS instead of EFS).

Also, there is a cost factor. Mumbai is exorbitantly high compared to any AWS region. Just feed the site on Ireland and setup a CloudFront to serve traffic in India.

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I dont know but if you hook up your site to a CDN that have nodes in India it will probably make the choice of AWS region even less important and make a real performance boost.

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