Re: [tlug] hosting in Japan

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2017-02-08 16:01 +0800 (Wed), Raymond Wan wrote:

> I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but Amazon Web Services
> has servers in Tokyo....

Google Cloud Platform[1] also has a data centre in Tokyo. They charge
very slightly more for Tokyo than for their other data centers; you
might check to see if the latency from Taiwain is acceptable if you
want their lowest rate.

Generally they're noticably cheaper than Amazon AWS, and I find them
easier to use and manage as well. The company I work for is in the
process of moving from AWS to GCP for these reasons, and we're far
from the first to do so.[2]

I've used Tsukaeru.net in the past (quite a long time ago) and found
them to be just fine and very economical. Support in English was no
problem at all. I was on a container, not a VM, but the savings were
with the mild annoyance of not having my own kernel.

For the past six or seven years, however, I've been running most of my
servers on my own hardware on 100 Mbps fibre connected to Interlink[3]
as my ISP. For about ¥7000/month I get a "business-level" connection
from them with 8 IP addresses. Note that this is separate from the
charge for the local loop; I pay about ¥5500 yen a month to NTT for
that. (I'm seriously thinking about shutting that down and just moving
my remaining services to Netlify[4] and Google, however.)

I also have a second ISP on that link, Asahi Net (with whom I had
originally set up the fiber connection), to whom I pay something like
¥700/month for a consumer connection with a static IP address. 

Doing just that might be an option if your server is low-traffic,
though they will throttle you after about 15 minutes (or perhaps 10-20
GB) if you start doing a lot of traffic. (I don't know where the
throttling starts, but it definitely hit a silly client of mine who
tried to use 15 fiber connections to run huge web site with many 10s
of Mbps continuous on each link.) The obvious thing to do is to talk
it over with the ISP first and make sure that you've got the right
kind of plan for whatever you're doing; there's no free ride on these
things.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/
[2]: https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/
[3]: https://www.interlink.ne.jp/
[4]: https://www.netlify.com/

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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