Best Server Setup? - Need advice from experienced users

Hello guys,

I am planning to use an API from an chinese company for an international product/website.

They have told me that the service is fastest when I would use a server in china to make api calls otherwise the response time could be very slow.

What would the best setup be so I can ensure I have very fast response time from their api but also have a fast hosting international hosting solution ?

What would you guys suggest? Should I use a server from HongKong/Singapore? Or do you guys maybe have another suggestion for a good solution?

best,
salexes

Depends on what you are trying to do. Are you trying to get real time API results on page load? If so, there wont be much to speed up anything because the end user will have to get your server response from wherever your server is located. Having your server in their location will (slightly) speed up your API response but the end user will never notice the difference.

Overoptimization is bad optimization. Get your thing up and running in any server. Then worry about response tmes and move servers if necessary.

demoownz said:

Depends on what you are trying to do. Are you trying to get real time API results on page load? If so, there wont be much to speed up anything because the end user will have to get your server response from wherever your server is located. Having your server in their location will (slightly) speed up your API response but the end user will never notice the difference.

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Great advice ^

I wouldn't agree with you

If you dont need real time data from their API and have a TON of data to get from their API to load a database, I would suggest bringing up a server in their area and then querying their API to load a database to later be moved to wherever your core audience will be. If you are not pulling down gigs of data this isnt necessary and you may be overthinking this part of your project.

Sounds like the Chinese company is worried about latency between their servers and your server hosted some place else. There's no rule saying your api server needs to both fetch the content and server it to your visitors. You could have a server in China make API calls and populates your data store. Then your visitors are pulling from your data store. I use the term "data store" because it could be a database, memcache, S3 bucket, whatever your requirements are. It's easy to spend other people's money.

I would get something working first and see if you really have a problem that needs solving/optimizing and then post back. Otherwise, you are trying to optimize for something against nothing to compare to.

Thank you guys for all the input. It really helped me out a lot.

I will follow your suggestions!

Hi again guys,

I have tested their API from my current servers location and the response times vary greatly between 2-15 seconds.

May I ask if you guys can recommend good hosting companies from where I could get a server in asia (looking for a server that is closer to china, to test response times from there).

Best,
salexes

Salexes said:

Hi again guys,

I have tested their API from my current servers location and the response times vary greatly between 2-15 seconds.

May I ask if you guys can recommend good hosting companies from where I could get a server in asia (looking for a server that is closer to china, to test response times from there).

Best,
salexes

Click to expand...

Where is your current server located? And how is the API call being made?
You can try GCP or AWS or OVH, they do have few locations in Asia.