This is a huge win for anyone hosting data that falls under Japan's very strict privacy and data export restrictions, and shows Linode is definitely competing for space in the professional hosting market.
Most providers offer a Japan hosting solution as the second facility in the APAC region after opening in Singapore or Hong Kong. Sing/HK is used for the bulk of the hosting business so typically the first offered but a Japan presence is next up, regardless of size, to offer a complete global solution for customers who handle data that must be within the Japanese borders in-place.
This is a huge win for anyone hosting data that falls under Japan's very strict privacy and data export restrictions, and shows Linode is definitely competing for space in the professional hosting market.
Since Linode is a US business, the government can still request data that is hosted on these servers, regardless of Japan's strict privacy restrictions.
I think you are misreading that comment, in that it isn't about whether the US can get to your data, it's about whether you as a provider can meet the Japanese laws with a US datacenter.
Cool, I can't say enough good things about Linode.
I've been using it with great results.
I have gotten some random reboots though, but I'm using the basic plan and it hasn't been bad at all for the price.
From personal experience, there are not much difference in access time from China to servers hosted in Japan or United States. They are both slow as hell to access. (If there are any difference in access time it would be very small for any users to notice). The cause may be the fact that Chinese ISP's proxies all requests to foreign sites.
If your customers are indeed coming from China, the most logical place to host your server would be Hong Kong IMO. It has good access time from the Chinese mainland and from other Asian countries.
If you're serving China, is HK that much better? When I went there and talked to people they mentioned the need to account for the North/South telecom divide. It's essentially two countries in terms of data center infrastructure.
No, HK not noticeably better than Japan, and Japan is only a little better than the US.
You biggest problem is that everything going into mainland China goes through the Great Firewall, which tends to slow stuff down (both lag and latency). (Outgoing data is faster, which I suspect means they don't really monitor it as actively).
The only way around TGF is to host your site in a mainland datacenter, probably getting a .cn address, and * definitely* complying with China's internet regulations.
Google does this, but it can't serve results from a mainland center (as it doesn't want to follow mainland regulations), so it gives you a link to results served by google.hk (which I think is hosted in Hong Kong, but you can probably host a .hk address in the US or Japan, since HK is pretty lax with regulations).
If you want fast mainland connections, you need a mainland datacenter, probably a .cn address, and to do that you need to follow Chinese regulations.
I don't know about North/South. Possibly some stuff is done by provincial governments. Certain zones (like Shenzhen), and people (or companies) with permission might be able to get unfiltered internet. Maybe there's two Great Firewalls, and you need two centers to get inside both. I'm not an expert.
But I'm 99% sure that HK datacenters will have the same obstacles (re TGF) that non-Chinese datacenters have.
As itsnotvalid has pointed out, some sites are best going to the effort of getting a mainland address, simply because it means China will try to work out any issues with you rather than simply banning you. As the paperwork and features are likely to take a while (I'm not an expert, but paperwork always takes time, especially if it's in another language), you might want to start the process before they ban your main site, to avoid service interruptions (and maybe for goodwill - it can't hurt to look like you want to cooperate).
It depends of what kind of business you are dealing with. If you mainly serves mainland, then host in mainland as you don't want sudden ban of your site.
However, please note that hosting a site in mainland requires a registration at the respective ICP bereau hosting province.
I know there are a lot linode users here but is it really Hacker NEWS suitable? I'm not saying that I don't want to see some of the cool/interesting stuff they do, but this isn't it.
If there was a HN post every time a provider launched a new PoP we'd be swamped.
We got lots of people looking for hosting solutions, so I think it's very relevant to HN. It's also interesting from a community POV simply because Linode is used by many HNers.
I would like to add that it's pathetic that you got down-voted; it's further proof of how flawed HN moderation system really is.
While this is a big deal for anyone hosting data in Japan, I question why it had to be in Tokyo.
The earthquake in March suggest that it might be prudent to have data retention in other areas of the country.
While Tokyo is a big city and that comes with pluses for access, it has the following minuses:
1. real estate is expensive relative to the rest of Japan.
2. summer is hot - why have data centers in Tokyo and not up in the mountains or up north where it's cooler?
3. the Greater Tokyo area is due for a major earthquake. In addition, there's historical data dating back centuries showing that a big quake in one area is followed by big quakes in other areas of the country (although fingers crossed that we don't see a 9.0 quake).
There has been a lot of press over the past few months about companies in Japan putting effort into backup facilities that aren't in the Tokyo area. After the quake in March there were blackouts and a reasonable amount of chaos - just imagine what it would be like if the Tokyo quake actually occurs.
All of Japan is prone to earthquakes. The latest one actually happened to the North, in a cooler area than Tokyo. That said, Tokyo isn't particularly hot for Japan. Sure Hokkaido and Tohoku are much cooler, but Tokyo is in the coolest half of Japan.
Ping is a lot more important than an eventual earthquake even in Japan. Especially considering that all of Japan is prone to earthquakes. If you go up North, the Kinki area (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto) will be quite far away, and lines will have much less redundancy than in a highly populated area.
In short, making a decision based on a possible huge natural disaster in the Kanto area would be a massive knee-jerk reaction.
It looks like their IP is residential. This ISP even has 1gbps lines commercially available in Tokyo from what I understand. I wouldn't be shocked if just put up a rack in up in the ISPs datacenter to make use of the cheapest bandwidth rates. They probably calculated most of their bandwidth in Japan will be in this network and they have good US peering.
Since, one rack today can be stuffed with 90 servers each up to 20x more powerful than what was around in 2005, I doubt they really require more than 1 well configured rack for a long time. When the time comes to add a second rack they always have the option to place it in another Japanese city, if they don't decide to goto another Asian country instead.
Considering the above, I doubt the savings were worth moving out of Tokyo.
Data centers are huge, hot, and expensive. Both how hot an area is and how prone to natural disasters it is drastically affect the price of the data center.
The parent post asks good questions. Why are the data centers in Tokyo rather than in 'x' where 'x' doesn't have said problems? My best guess is network connectivity.
I'd say the other option is EC2/AWS/Amazon with their presence in both Tokyo and Singapore. But the choice between Linode or AWS tends to come down to other things (Linode is cheaper and I'd say simple/more predictable...AWS is more complex and offers way more "cloud" services).
Our linode is currently in London (I didn't set it up...), but I'm probably going to request a move to the Tokyo datacenter in the next week. Ping times to Tokyo (136 ms) are literally half what they are to London (297 ms) and still better than Fremont (208 ms). Seems like a no-brainer to try moving it.
From my iiNet DSL2+ connection in Perth, Australia to tokyo1.linode.com, I get 204ms ping and 14 hops, and from a Telstra fibre connection, I get 174ms and 15 hops.
That compares to about 250ms and 12 hops on iiNet, and 210ms and 14 hops on Telstra to fremont1.linode.com.
Yes, it's faster than Fremont. I moved to Dallas a few weeks ago after the third Fremont outage; now I wish I'd known this was coming down the pipeline.
Most ISPs will route to Japan sensibly, but a few try and save money and route via the US (note that this is the same as hosting with Amazon in Singapore).
Most providers offer a Japan hosting solution as the second facility in the APAC region after opening in Singapore or Hong Kong. Sing/HK is used for the bulk of the hosting business so typically the first offered but a Japan presence is next up, regardless of size, to offer a complete global solution for customers who handle data that must be within the Japanese borders in-place.