Despite what DO said in their announcement, my experience says that Australian u...

nwh · on Feb 11, 2014

They're all terrible, but SFO does look better for me than the rest.

    --- speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 281.718/334.077/458.775/43.216 ms

    --- speedtest-ams2.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 368.574/423.556/581.576/46.758 ms

    --- speedtest-nyc2.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 47 packets received, 6.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 283.225/338.437/428.314/31.986 ms

    --- speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 49 packets received, 2.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 284.853/339.193/424.864/29.139 ms

    --- speedtest-ams1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 47 packets received, 6.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 352.165/453.513/584.099/52.971 ms

    --- speedtest-sfo1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
    50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 205.293/324.091/445.077/54.935 ms

andrewf · on Feb 11, 2014

It's a coinflip. Some users will route straight to Asia (because their ISPs are buying the right bandwidth) and be better off with Singapore. Some will route to Asia via the western US, and will be better served from California.

It's bad enough that when Blizzard sold region-locked Starcraft 2, the Australian version of the game was the only one which gave players access to two regions - Southeast Asia and North America.

Fortunately, it's 2014 and both AWS and Rackspace are in Sydney now. If you're serving Australians, I think you should just use one of them.