Monday
Nov262007
Scale to China
Monday, November 26, 2007 at 4:38AM
Hello all,
does anyone have experience in scaling a european website to china?
The main problem in china is the internet connectivity to websites outside china, that means latency and packetloss (and perhaps filtering) make things difficult.
The options I see are:
1. Host you application in china, but where? I haven't got a answer from any chinese ISP I contacted. On the other hand I don't really want to host in china.
2. Build your own CDN. Wikipedia shows how it goes. Get a bunch of machines (but where? see point 1) put squid on them, implement intelligent cache invalidation and you're set. But where can I get machines in china? Where do I need them in china? There are soe big isps with limited peering capability, so I'd need servers in every network.
3. Get professional CDN services. Akamai, ChinaCache, CDNetworks, etc etc.. They all provide services in china. The problem is: they are all very expensive.
4. Amazon EC2/S3 ? Is it worth thinking about this way? I am not sure, because they only have US and Ireland based datacenters. So we are stuck to the connectivity problem..
My favourite way:
Rent a bunch of linux servers in 4-5 big cities in china in different networks and build my own CDN.
What do you think?
Regards
Bjoern
does anyone have experience in scaling a european website to china?
The main problem in china is the internet connectivity to websites outside china, that means latency and packetloss (and perhaps filtering) make things difficult.
The options I see are:
1. Host you application in china, but where? I haven't got a answer from any chinese ISP I contacted. On the other hand I don't really want to host in china.
2. Build your own CDN. Wikipedia shows how it goes. Get a bunch of machines (but where? see point 1) put squid on them, implement intelligent cache invalidation and you're set. But where can I get machines in china? Where do I need them in china? There are soe big isps with limited peering capability, so I'd need servers in every network.
3. Get professional CDN services. Akamai, ChinaCache, CDNetworks, etc etc.. They all provide services in china. The problem is: they are all very expensive.
4. Amazon EC2/S3 ? Is it worth thinking about this way? I am not sure, because they only have US and Ireland based datacenters. So we are stuck to the connectivity problem..
My favourite way:
Rent a bunch of linux servers in 4-5 big cities in china in different networks and build my own CDN.
What do you think?
Regards
Bjoern
Reader Comments (7)
The problem will be for you to find a provider in China that speaks English :)
Jeff
www.ipdeny.com
Connectivity from China to the outside world is a problem. I know as I lived there for some time. Consequently locating your servers outside of China will not give you what you need here as no matter how many servers you locate in other countries, access speed to them is going to be poor from within China. Your only sensible option, in my view, is to use a CDN where the servers are located in China. Whether the likes of Akamai cover China specifically, I don't know, you would need to speak to them, but building your own is an option. If you like, visit our site ( www.kitesystems.com ) contact me through the contact us form and I can give you the details of a company we work closely with who have a lot of datacentres in China and would be able to discuss your options with you and provide hosting services for your severs if you decide to go down this route. He speaks perfect English.
According to the contact information, www.kitesystems.com is hosted at Hong Kong. As far as I know, there a lot of difference between Hong Kong and mainland. I worked for a UK company last year, the distribution is: headquarters in London, developers in Beijing and servers in Hong Kong.
Looks like highscalability.com doesn't use rel=nofollow on links in submitted comments, and thus has attracted SEO spammers. Every "l" in the post that started this thread is actually a link to a different porn site.
I'm actually a bit surprised at the effort put into this particular spam. It certainly appears that the message was hand crafted by a domain expert. Those porn sites must be paying pretty well for linkspam these days.
Yes www.kitesystems.com is based in Hong Kong and we therefore host here. Most of our clients are HK based so it is the obvious choice for us.
Akamai do cover China, but at a cost, so that is an option for you. There are other concerns with China as regards the fact that the north and south run on different networks and connectivity between the two is poor (it's a strange and complicated set-up, unsurprisingly for China). You could build your own CDN by positioning servers in various cities in China which, depending on how you set it up, could overcome the north/south issue, but you are looking at capex costs to set it up, versus monthly charges from Akamai. Simple enough to work out the relative costs and make a choice based on that.
if you want rent a linux servers in some big citys .and bulid your CDN,
i mean ,you can host your apps in beijing,shanghai and guangzhou . it's enough for cover 95% Connectivity - a really stock software service provider tell me . and the citys i suggest are the China bone transfer line at.
also ,you can host one mirror servers in one of the three citys, and choice one china CDN provider to server your website.
second,if you want to find a china CDN provider, the problem is
how its CDN node connect to you server in Europe ,and pull the contents? Sometime we need a CDN node in HongKong or Europe be a brige. and we need to trace your server to find the better node.
and the price , i dont think the CDN service is expensive.
the more info ,you can visit www.chinanetcenter.com or mail to me .
mail: domore99@hotmail.com
Try Beijing Fastweb (www.fastweb.com.cn).... A local CDN in China with acceptable price.
And speak English too...
--edward