Back in November the bricks were laid to set up the Servebolt Cloud Region Singapore. Together with high performance network operator Blix Solutions, Servebolt decided to enter the South-East Asian market by setting up a full featured point of presence in Singapore.
The Singapore location was opened and is available for Servebolt users as of February 21st 2019.
Reduced network latency = faster web performance
Great web performance starts with low network latency between client and server. At Servebolt we use 50ms as the threshold value for excellent performance. When latency increases further, the connection setup time increases exponentially. This latency adds to the response time for the first HTML request. This is the request that has the greatest impact on overall web performance, therefore minimizing network latency is crucial.
Singapore is the very best connected hub for internet in South-East Asia. All main sea cables are connected there, resulting in super low network latency from Mumbai and India in the east, to Japan in the North and towards Australia in the south-west.
Approximate ping times to Singapore from central cities in the area
- Malaysia – 7ms
- Jakarta – 14ms
- Hong Kong – 34ms
- Bangkok – 35ms
- Chennai – 36ms
- Bangalore – 43ms
- Hyderabad – 46ms
- Taipei – 52ms
- Ho Chi Minh City – 52ms
- Phnom Penh – 52ms
- Hanoi – 54ms
- Indore – 62ms
- Koto – 68ms
- Tokyo – 68ms
- Pune – 69ms
- Manila – 72ms
- New Dehli – 72ms
- Dhaka – 73ms
- Osaka – 75ms
- Dubai – 82ms
- Sapporo – 85ms
- Dagupan – 92ms
- Adelaide 93ms
- Sydney 93ms
- Melbourne 94ms
When network latency exceeds 70-80ms, you can consider using a CDN in addition to Servebolt. Any CDN will add some latency on the HTML response time (25-50ms), but this cost can be outweighed by serving all the static assets from a closer CDN edge location.
Close to the Cloudflare Network Edge
Close proximity to the Cloudflare edge is also always a consideration when deciding where to place our cloud regions. Having great connectivity to and from Cloudflare’s network is essential because they serve 75% of the reverse proxy CDN market. If our routes to and from Cloudflare are short, this will benefit every visitor to any webpage using Cloudflare on our network.
Meeting the local WordPress Community in Singapore
To mark the opening of the Singapore Servebolt Cloud Region, Servebolt CEO Erlend Eide did a talk on WordPress, what is slow and what is fast, and why you should stop using caching for performance on the Singapore WordPress Meetup.
The most asked question during the hours at the WP Meetup was where Servebolt had put up the data center.
Servebolt Cloud Singapore in New Tech Park
New Tech Park is a well-connected hub of technology companies and now also houses the South-East Asian Servebolt Cloud infrastructure.
The best test is always your own site – Servebolt.com
Experimenting with new infrastructure is always fun with the website we know best, so we did it with our own servebolt.com site. We run a multi-origin setup with distributed copies of our website with a geo load balancer in front that routes traffic to the closest server.
The Servebolt websites are served to the US from New York, Southern Africa from Johannesburg, Europe from Oslo, and Asia was partially routed to Europe and partially to the US. With the Singapore location up and running, the first thing we did was add a fourth origin to our hosting setup.
Most of Asia, the Middle East and Oceania is now served directly from Singapore instead of Europe or the US.
We have upped the SiteSpeedSampleRate in Google Analytics to collect better performance data than Google Analytics does by default with the standard 10% sample. This graph shows the page load time in seconds for February. The loading time for visitors from Singapore and South-East Asia dropped sharply immediately after routing the visitors to the Singapore Servebolt Cloud Region.
The Servebolt Cloud is ready for you, it’s time to make the web faster in Asia too!
