

"This page is best viewed from the United States" - jodoglevy
http://chronline.posterous.com/this-page-is-best-viewed-outside-the-us

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morsch
I thought this would be about content restrictions that prevent international
users from seeing the same stuff as US users.

Most of his arguments seem to apply to access from the US just as they apply
to international access. He describes his experiences with slow network access
in various countries, but slow mobile internet access exists in the US (and
other developed countries) as well -- either because you're so rural that
you're lucky to get even 2G data, or because you're _so urban_ that the 3G
bandwidth is clogged. Granted, slow access is probably more widespread in non-
US, developing or underdeveloped countries.

Either way, yes, obviously you should try to minimize your site's download
size, and a full-featured but minimalistic version of a site is a very good
thing to have.

The only thing that seems to me to apply only to international access is the
advice to make your site available through an international CDN.

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latch
I wish people didn't use S3 in lieu of a CDN.

From Hong Kong on a 100mbps line (and I can hit 11MB up and down):

    
    
      10mb binary file
    
      S3 US Standard avg 112k/s took 1:31
    
      S3 Singapore avg 1290K/s took 0:07
    
      S3 Tokyo avg 895K/s took 0:11
    
      Cloudfront avg 8758k/sec took 0:01
    

Latency to Singapore is around 50ms, latency to Cloudfront is < 4ms.

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dredmorbius
CloudFront _is_ S3-backed CDN.

~~~
coderdude
You can use S3 as an origin server for CloudFront but it's not serving files
directly from S3. CloudFront has "edge locations" that you can push files to
from S3 -- which "stores the original, definitive versions of your files."[1]

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/>

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks. Still picking this up myself.

~~~
enjo
It's important to note that Cloudfront also supports custom origins, so it
doesn't even have to involve s3 these days.

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xiaoma
> _"Some big cities like Taipei, Beijing, and Singapore have government
> sponsored free public wireless more or less all throughout the city"_

Bullshit. I just moved from Beijing. Not only is there no government sponsored
wireless all throughout the city, but internet cafes must record each
customer's ID info before you can log-on. Even McDonalds' free internet for
customers requires identification (which is troublesome for foreigners or
anyone without national ID cards).

I was in Singapore less than three months ago, and found no public free wifi
during my stay. On the good side, many, many cafes there offer wifi and it's
not locked down like in Beijing.

Taiwan, on the other hand is making strides with their new service rolled out
last October.

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swiecki
This could really use a lot of editing. Far too much of it is whining about
slow internet that doesn't reach a meaningful conclusion, but instead
generalizes from his anecdote.

If anyone is reading comments before reading the article, I recommend scanning
it quickly. You won't miss anything.

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sandieman
Not that this matters but relative to the other sites listed going after
"world domination" dukechronicle has much higher % of US based traffic.

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chsnow
Good article, thanks.

