As a Geek I can appreciate the amount of work that went into planning this upgrade, a good job well done – give them a raise I say!

A 2 minute time-out would have nothing to do with any latency at Xero’s end. Hosting in the USA only adds about 200ms to the round-trip time and, from what I have read, they are using regional content distribution for static content anyway (images, JavaScript libraries, etc). For general usage, the latency should be almost invisible. A 2 minute timeout seems like a network problem at your end, rather than a problem with Xero’s infrastructure.

Hi Craig
I am interested in : “Mixture of diagonal and vertical scaling of hardware for increased capacity and performance”

Can you elaborate a little?

Thanks
JY

Sorry for the delay overseas

@Wayne
The problem is not our line we have an ISP grade fibre line high speed etc

I think the issue I raised is misunderstood by some of the people who replied; all the processors in the world etc will not overcome the lack of regionally hosted the data. There would be many advantages commercially for Xero doing this as well as speed.

“A 2 minute timeout seems like a network problem at your end, rather than a problem with Xero’s infrastructure.”

We used to host in the States but have since moved everything to NZ because of the following:

1. It is faster. New internet traffic (non-cached) such as DB queries and SSL traffic is normally 128 – 256Kbits through major NZ ISPs DSL so if your servers were here local customers would have 8Mbit traffic.

2. More Hops = more problems. If I do a traceroute to an NZ IP address I can expect around 10 hops. When I traceroute Xero it is 15 hops which gives the opportunity for more points of failure.

3. Local access IS better. Cloud infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC2 also appreciate these issues and clusters servers Internationally so if I access the site from the US it uses a US node; if I access the site from the UK it uses the UK node.

We’re presently structuring our servers to be EC2 compatible so when we do finally get an EC2 node in NZ we can expand our servers through their cloud.

Don’t know how this would all work with Windows though. We only use Open Source tech: http://brynnneilson.blogspot.com/2009/06/free-software-is-better-for-business.html

brynn

@Brynn

As a network operator I disagree. Local hosting is actually quite cheap, and national bandwidth very much so. (It’s the international CIR that’s pricy).

I see Xero as a premium product, and hence find it supprising that it’s not sitting on the national backbone. (I haven’t trace routed the servers to verify it’s intl as I’m sitting in a restraunt on my iPhone).

Liam. (nzl@me.com).

@jake
I am not asking for all of Xero to be hosted in NZ or even Australasia. All I think is US customers access US servers, NZ/Aus servers in this part of the world. This is not a religious argument here; it will be faster for NZ/Aus customers if it is closer; basic physics.

Local hosting is not expensive in my opinion

Craig

Rackspace claim 100% uptime but they don’t achieve it as per a 45 minute downtime they had (and Xero had) 2 months ago. No one has 100% and it is naive for anyone to claim this. Just because their SLA says this doesn’t mean they or anyone else achieves.

Hosting web based systems with high availability in NZ is not impossible; we have done it for 4.5 years.

Datacom has a $30 million dollar data centre in Albany with Multi everything.

As far as “lots” of your customers having NZ, Australian and UK accounts I find that hard to believe. Must of your customers would be in NZ surely.

The single user account concept is not as important as reasonable speed.

I understand where you’re coming from with alot of your comments, but I side with the “Host some in NZ” team.

“What if you have a organization in NZ, Australia and the UK (which a lot of our customers do)? What if you travel? Do you expect your data to move with you on that flight to the UK?”
What if you were to let me choose where I host my data? If I were to be spending alot of time offshore I would choose to host offshore, and deal with the latency when in NZ. Since I spend 99.9% of my time in NZ, I would opt to have all the data hosted in NZ, and deal with it being in NZ while I’m overseas.

You also imply that hosting in NZ would result in more downtime, I would gladly trade a bit more downtime in return for Xero being alot more snappy. If you counted the seconds I spend waiting for pages to load that adds up for alot of downtime over a year! (Especially when I’m in Xero all day )

James – you’re not stating the obvious

1) Latency – sure light travels fast but a NZ customer will always have a slower experience using a US hosted site – especially if there are multiple round trips (as an aside – check out aptimize for some cool web efficiency gains)
2) Jurisdiction is a major issue here. Already the Government is demanding that services it procures are domiciled locally. While not an issue for SMEs, it’s something we can’t ignore. Imagine, for example, the governemnt deciding that getting NZ SMEs onto SaaS apps was a good investment. Right now, if they were to procure those services themselves, companies like Xero would be unable to pitch for that contract…..

More here – https://www.cloudave.com/link/where-is-your-data

Speed is a critical factor for us. We are considering a shift to Xero and we are larger than ‘small’ with 140 staff and 9 campuses. Are there similar size organisations on Xero who can speak objectively about the speed of Xero in data input and particularly in report writing? We have outgrown QuickBoooks and wonder if Xero could cope?