

Ask HN: price of latency - swah

Hi guys,<p>how important it is, for a website which is kinda "Internet-banking", to be hosted near its users?<p>I'm asking this because hosting a webapp on my country (Brazil) vs Linode (which is by no way cheap) seems to be about 3x more expensive.
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iuguy
It depends entirely on your competitors, the importance of speed to your users
and the costs involved.

If your users are doing any click and trade type stuff or buying and selling
products where prices fluctuate over the course of seconds then latency will
be a very big issue for them.

If on the other hand users are just generally logging in, checking stuff,
making payments etc. then latency becomes less of an issue.

As a general rule of thumb, make sure that your page shouldn't take more than
a few seconds to load on a DSL connection. Any more than 5 seconds and you're
going to get frustrated users. You can help by using CDNs to cache static
content and making sure your pages are served compressed.

