Jeremy and I went to Barcamp Manchester last Saturday – our photos are on Flickr as usual.  It turned out to be six months to the day since we went live with Brightbox too!

We ran a competition on the day: people had to tell us what they’d do with a Brightbox virtual machine and the best suggestion (as judged by us) kwould win a years hosting on one.  Throughout the day people wrote their ideas on post-it notes and we sifted through them at the end.

Here are some of the suggestions:

• A service to archive scans of old maps for Open Street Map
• Twitter wall app – @replies aggregated in the style of facebook’s wall-to-wall messages
• Start a rails hosting company
• Learn PHP
• Hosting for Deb
• Slowly ticking countdown timer to cause paranoia
• App to mix samples from fiction books to make new fiction
• Run a free hosting competition
• Flame retardant killer robots
• “Anything! They’re so flexible and scalable the possibilities are endless! We love Brightbox!”
• “Dye your hair orange”

The winner was Chris Maltby, who said he’d use it to host a web-based multiplayer turn-based strategy game. This made our geeky senses tingle.

Rob Lee also suggested we open source our management tools – which we already do! I guess we just don’t make a big enough deal about it. Expect to see us making a bigger deal about it soon.

As Google’s Webmaster Help Centre explains:

While all sites in our index return for searches restricted to “the web,” we draw on a relevant subset of sites for each country restrict. Our crawlers identify the country that corresponds to a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site’s IP address, and its domain restrict.

That said, your site’s domain doesn’t need to match the country domain for which you’d like it to return…

Now, I can’t really see how Big G can work out the first “factor” (physical location) without the second (IP address), using some sort of IP geolocation data. So as far as I can see, if you want to appear in the “pages from the UK” set of results in Google UK, having a UK IP address is an important factor.

what would be the advantages of hosting with a UK company over a US based company

One simple repercussion of hosting a site for a European audience on an ISP in the USA concerns trans-atlantic connectivity, which increases latency. If your ISP is on the West Coast it’s even worse.

Some casual ping testing from a machine in the UK to a number of Rails hosts in the US showed between 95 and 161 millisecond round trip times. With HTTP ping testing I was seeing up to 327ms, which is likely due to the TCP handshake consisting of at least 2 packets before the request is even issued. From the same machine to a Brightbox (different ISPs of course) I saw around 15 milisecond ping RTT and 33 millisecond HTTP.

Average Ping RTT graph (smaller is better)

Average HTTP RTT graph (smaller is better)

With HTTP features such as persistent connections you can reduce the impact of the TCP handshake, but with these hosts your European visitors will still see up to 161ms delay before your Rails application even starts processing the request. Fragment caching won’t help you much there. With the new breed of AJAX web applications this is a huge impact on how responsive things will feel to your visitors.

This wasn’t a scientific test with double blind trials, lab coats and conical flasks but it gives you an idea of what a difference 5,500 kilometers makes.

We’ll be using this blog to post interesting stuff (in our opinion) about the new UK-based Rails hosting service we’ll be launching soon.