Laurent Kretz

Still on the final track for CabEasy.com v1 launch, I’ve been wondering if Dreamhost was the best option to support the first batch of users. I - of course and sorry in advance … - intend to spam my friends to ask them the favor of beta-testing the site, and spreading the word. Being french and living in New York, this will mean a stream of visitors from Europe and the US as early as the beta launch.

Dreamhost is in Los Angeles, 5,650 miles (9,100 km) from Paris (5,840 miles from my hometown, where I’ll sure get some support from my mother !!). So item #1 on the spec list is to try to find a web host that would be well located between Europe and the US.

CabEasy.com will be a very low page views generator. Ideally, that’s my objective, it will have only 1 main page, where you would do everything. A real web app. However, there is (and will be even more) a lot of exchanges with various APIs, and mainly google maps. And that means Mountain View, CA USA. So if the stream from CabEasy.com’s server down to the user is limited (a few dozens kilobytes for the page), the stream between my server and other API’s servers will be heavy. Or those services are located in the US, and mainly on the West Coast. So hosting the site in London or Paris might not be a good idea either. Item #2.

Now of course, it is very early to speak about traffic. I don’t think (but I don’t know …) that you can speak about important “traffic” before …. 10,000 daily uniques ? 50,000 daily uniques ? If I get a steady flow of 5,000 uniques, i’ll be happy ;)  Item #3 on the spec list is: a cheap shared web hosting solution.

So I started comparing the main web hosts in the US, and more specifically the ones on the East Coast. I then launched some traceroutes from various traceroute servers from France and the US to see what would be the most acceptable solution.

As this takes some time and could be useful to others, I decided to share it. All numbers are milliseconds. In red is any connection that exceeds 150ms. In blue is any connection below 60ms. It seems that that MaiaHost, GetInSpace or NY Internet would be the best choices: their averages traceroutes are below 75ms.

Notes:

The traceroutes are from the following traceroute / tracert servers:
T1 Shopper (Denver, Colorado, USA)
Watchour.com (Jersey City, NJ, USA)
Network-Tools.com (Dallas, Texas, USA)
FrontierOnline (Paris - Evry, France)
SDV (Strasbourg, France)
Stella Net (Valbonne, near Nice, France)

How I located an IP or host ?
Info Sniper, http://www.infosniper.net/

Web hosts in New York
http://www.hostsearch.com/hostdirectory/new_york_web_hosting.asp

Some interesting/serious web hosts on the East Coast:
NYI, New York Internet, New York City
Host A Site (hosted by NYI, but with cheaper plans)
Get In Space, Long Island
MaiaHost, near Washington, DC

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!