

Ask HN: What would it take to setup a server farm in Haiti - zekenie

First let me say that I&#x27;m an American. I was doing some programming work in Haiti with a friend who&#x27;s Haitian. We were building a text message tool that ran off of GSM modems and netbooks.<p>We got to talking about tech in low resource settings. As far as we can tell, there are no server companies in Haiti. This is a problem because all web services are very slow. All traffic has to go to US servers.<p>Aside from reliable electricity, what would be needed for an MVP? What types of internet connections? Just a static IP and decent bandwidth? In terms of servers, could a bunch of raspberry pis ever work?<p>I&#x27;m more of a programmer than a server person but I&#x27;m interested in testing this idea out some day.
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iSloth
Your problem is the countries network infrastructure not the physical location
of the servers, for example here in the UK basically all websites will load
quick, it's hard to tell just from page load speeds if a server was located 10
miles down the road from me in the UK, or across the pond in the USA. However
Haiti is closer to the USA than the UK, so it's really not server location
that makes the difference.

Building a server farm in Haiti isn't really going to improve the speed of web
services, what you would need to look at is getting better network
infrastructure around the country and back to the main internet exchanges
within the US.

Normally the problems you face here is the price of sub-sea cable bandwidth is
greatly dependant on the economies of scale; they typically want massive
investments to drive the prices down to reasonable levels. Then when you have
the off-island bandwidth sorted you need to build faster local infrastructure
to get this bandwidth to your users.

Once you have faster internet connections with decent global connectivity you
will naturally start to see service providers build data centers out there.

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codemonkeymike
I believe there is an NPR Marketplace podcast about the difficulties of
building a school in Haiti, I can't imagine how much harder it would be if you
needed constant power.

Edit: found it [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-
tues...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135750053/the-tuesday-
podcast-how-to-build-a-school-in-haiti)

Maybe Dominican Republic would be a better option

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zekenie
Maybe... I've been to both. It would be hard. But, I also think there would
have to be a change in expectations about what a server farm is... What it
looks like. I think it could be very important to make it work in Haiti, even
if it was a modest start.

