Last week, Amazon has announced that they opened the data center in Asia Pacific Region in Singapore.

This has nothing to do with Amazon shopping mall as you know. Although it’s run by the same company, Amazon has been providing hosting, data storage and other web services so called “Cloud services” to users.

They now have the four locations you can choose to host your website:

• US North Virginia
• US North California
• EU Ireland
• APAC Singapore

This is very important if you target people in Asia because it reduces the latency I discussed here to half compared to hosting your website in the US West Coast area.

Please see more about this here.

The news like “Fiber optic ocean cable between US and Aisa” is very promising to improve the latency between US and Japan.

However, delivering the image or video contents to Japanese customers in Japan from US still takes more time.

For example, my client has a Japanese site which has been hosted at a data center in downtown, Los Angeles. As he has recently started using bigger size of product images and more graphics packed web page, his website has started to crawl for all of his Japanese customers.

Having his site hosted in US has a big advantage in terms of the cost. When I checked a year ago, it would cost more than three times to host his dedicated server in Japan. However, the latency is a problem. For example, when I measured the download time of 90KB image in Tokyo, Japan from both Osaka and Los Angeles, there was almost one second difference between them. It’s huge especially when the average size of a web page in his site exceed 1 MB.

Because of the hosting cost, moving his entire machine to Japan wasn’t a solution. So, we rent a fairly inexpensive shared hosting site in Osaka, Japan and we moved only images to the site and had it deliver the images from there.

Immediately, it was a great success. his customers are happy to get the images downloaded faster and now that all the images are delivered from Japan, it reduced the traffic to the US machine to about half and improved the web performance overall.