What would you pay for bandwidth in Asia / HK

[HostHK]

If any of you are familiar with bandwidth in Asia, you may know that the cost are prohibitively expensive to setup any sort of high bandwidth application or website.

In HK, where we operate, bandwidth costs can easily reach over US$100 /Mbit. But unless your target audience is Asia (excluding HK), that cost is just not justifiable and cheaper options do exist. But still, what price would you consider reasonable?

Even with high levels of commitment, bandwidth costs are typically more US$60 /month for dedicated international bandwidth. And by high levels, I mean anything over 50Mbit. But this should be pretty good bandwidth with generally good performance all over the world. If you need just HK bandwidth, this comes much cheaper at about $5 - 6 /Mbit so if your target is HK, costs are in your favor. But what if your target audience is just the US or EU?

Hurricane Electric have recently started to offer transit services in HK and at cut throat prices compared to the traditional carriers. Their pricing has been as low as US$5/mbit on 1Gbit commit and $15 - $25 on 100Mbit commits. A considerable saving compared to other carriers.

Here is a conversion to cost per GB transferred:

$25 /Mbit = $0.08 /GB
$15 /Mbit = $0.05 /GB
$5 /Mbit = $0.017 /GB

Are these prices acceptable for high bandwidth users looking for an Asian mirror? Bareing in mind that Asian traffic would mostly be routed via the US meaning poor performance for the local region. What do you guys think?

 

[UltimA]

In the past, as I'm sure you know, Hong Kong was the desired market for hosting the larger download websites.

It seems in recent years the bandwidth cost made it a prohibitive market for newer webmasters to enter. Other alternatives such as Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine opened up with much more competitive costs than the older days.

If it can shown to newer webmasters that HK traffic is still efficient and even cost effective, I believe you can get webmasters back on the HK market. Personally, I've always had a preference for HK, but then again that's the first 'offshore' I started with. :pirate:


When it comes to costs though, the figures you've mentioned are certainly much cheaper than 2006. Some of the quotes I received back in the day were headspinners, lol

 

[HostHK]

I am aware that in the past, there have been a few larger websites hosted in HK due to the favorable legal environment. But bandwidth in HK has always been expensive and in fact, prices have been coming down considerably over the last few years.

I would like to point out that we are not seeking out any kind of business that is not 100% above board. One key area of interest in HK servers is actually the VPN business which can also be hindered by typical HK bandwidth costs. Running a VPN server in HK is relatively costly and depending on target markets, this kind of bandwidth may be a very healthy addition to help bring down such costs.

Low bandwidth costs benefit not only 'pirates' but also legitimate business operating CDNs, VPNs, remote backups, secure storage to avoid being under the watchful eye of another government perhaps.

But as EU users can readily accept hosting based in the US, and visa versa, could this also be true of hosting based in Asia? Would an EU/US person be happy with Asian based hosting, even if their target was EU/US? Probably not, but it may make a difference for Asian webmasters with US/EU audiences, would it not?

Main question is, are the above pricing competitive when compared to the US/EU?