So my Amazon EC2 Singapore server prepayment period ended earlier this month and I've been meaning to switch hosting provider ever since gaffs at EC2 datacenters started and also because of the actions Amazon EC2 taken against various groups (*cough* wikileaks)

I never really associated Amazon with a reliable hosting service even though I've been using them for a while now, but it was the only choice back then, and it really became THE only choice when they came out with the Singapore servers.

As you may know I'm located in Hong Kong, so naturally I want my server closer to me so that it loads faster. So my search criteria is plain and simple. It must be:

• Close to Hong Kong physically (for reduced latency)
• Cost around the same or lower than Amazon EC2 small instance
  • This includes bandwidth etc... all those "hidden" cost
• It should ideally give me more than 1 IP(v4) per server so I can get SSL certs for multiple domains
• It should have a good backup system
• Redundancy

I've long known that Rackspace has been in the cloud hosting busniess. I did try Mosso and SliceHost back in the days which was the precursor to Rackspace Cloud but they were at the time too costly and located in the US only and was generally not great.

But today I tried Rackspace Cloud in the US again having grown to going on sites like github.com which is hosted on Rackspace Cloud that seemed to be performing very well in terms of the performance.

The finding is as follows:

• [PRO] Rackspace Cloud can have multiple IP per server
• [PRO] Performance seems better than EC2 with 4 virtual cores + burstable
• [PRO] Pricing is acceptable.
• [PRO] Cloud Files' CDN is attractive
• [PRO] Backed by Rackspace's famous fanatical support (I've had managed dedicated servers with them in UK and HK and the staffs are always nice)
• [PRO] RDNS
• [CON] US / UK only
• [CON] No external firewall

Generally I was impress by Cloud Servers' advances since they've launched, but the only problem is that the location really became a deal breaker for Asia Pacific region. I tested the instance by duplicating the same environment and transferring this website over to the Cloud Server and ran speed test using the Net graphs of Firebug. The finding is that the speed difference even though the Cloud Server 'appears' snappier, it is a matter of a 2.x second DOM Ready page load (from EC2 Singapore) to a 6.x seconds DOM Ready page load (from Cloud Server US).

Thus it ruled Rackspace Cloud Servers out of my contention.

Later on in the day when I was searching for cloud hosting for APAC (Asia Pacific) again, I noticed a company called SoftLayer that will be launching a Singapore cloud server datacenter on October 3rd (came up in the Google News stream). So I had a look on their website, and it looks 'promising'.

I will let you judge on it yourself however, because as of writing :) I haven't been able to test the performance. http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer

Moving on... probably one of the least expected (on my mind anyway) was that another fairly reputable cloud hosting company from the US started a PoP in Tokyo. Linode started their Tokyo cloud hosting just a few days ago and I feel very lucky to be able to try out one of their plans, but of course I cannot make any prejudgements until I tried it myself!

So a quick look on Linode's website it was clear the closest instance to the Amazon EC2 server I had was the Linode 1024. At just $40 usd a month, I thought it was better pricing wise than EC2, Rackspace Cloud and SoftLayer. So I do what I do and setup a CentOS 6 image (note that I was using CentOS 5, and Rackspace Cloud didn't have CentOS 6 either!) which was preferable and moved my website over for testing. My findings were as follows:

• [PRO] Much more responsive overall experience than EC2 (implies a better performance hardware)
• [PRO] Slightly quicker than Rackspace Cloud (although this could just be because of the proximity rather than a difference in processing power)
• [PRO] Multiple IP
• [PRO] 100 mbit port by default (I did not measure Rackspace Cloud port speed but I suspect the same, however SoftLayer comes with 10 mbit port as standard hence why I'm mentioning this)
• [PRO] Nice web interface for management of cloud instance
• [PRO] Backups
• [PRO] Customisations to instance - add additional RAM/Storage/Transfer
• [PRO] Comes with DNS manager
• [PRO] RDNS
• [PRO] Free IPv6 in 'testing' in Tokyo (already avaliable in US)
• [CON] No hourly rates
• [CON] No external firewall option

Speed wise, the latency is slightly lower than Amazon EC2 at times, but the difference was negligble. And given the number of PROs I've listed, Linode was a clear winner for me going forward. They do offer 7 days money back garuntee as well so you can try before you commit.

I was so impressed with Linode however that I migrated everything over right away.

Some might ask why haven't I tried any local cloud providers? The problem with local cloud providers as I've tweeted in a few occassions is that they're simply too small and seemingly unprofessional (I'd say 50% of this impression is down to their website). This is a problem in cloud infrastructure because it is about economy of scale.

Well, for what's it's worth, I hope this gives Asia Pacific cloud hunters a bit more idea of the state we're in today and the choices there are in the space.

If you're also thinking of going Linode, then please consider putting me in as your referer by following this link to sign up:

http://www.linode.com/?r=fe72e2363e8c952d65de4a439dcf3eb6687f5fe7

or enter my referralcode: fe72e2363e8c952d65de4a439dcf3eb6687f5fe7

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