Hosting in Bhutan vs abroad: what actually matters

Where should the server be? We get asked this by clients who have heard that local is faster, by clients who have heard that foreign is more reliable, and by clients whose accountant has asked why there is a dollar charge on a card. The answer depends on who your visitors are, what the site does, and how you want to pay. It rarely depends on patriotism.

Where the traffic actually goes

Bhutan’s international internet runs through India. When someone in Thimphu opens a site hosted in Singapore, the request goes down to the border, across Indian networks, and on to Singapore, then back the same way. When they open a site hosted in Frankfurt or the United States, it goes further.

In our experience, a request from Thimphu to a server in Mumbai or Singapore takes somewhere under a tenth of a second to come back, and a request to Europe or North America takes a few times longer. A server in Thimphu answers faster still for local visitors, but the difference on a single request is small.

What is not small is the number of requests. A typical business site loads dozens of files: HTML, CSS, scripts, fonts, images. On a 4G connection from a mid-range Android, page weight and request count dominate the load time. That is why we spend more effort on the size of the site than on the location of the server. See designing for the phones people in Bhutan actually use.

What a CDN changes

A CDN keeps copies of your site’s static files, images, CSS, scripts, sometimes whole pages, at edge locations close to the visitor. The nearest edge locations to Bhutan are in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, not in Thimphu, but they are much closer than the origin server, and they serve the bulk of every page.

With a CDN in front, the origin server’s country mostly stops mattering for visitors in Bhutan. The HTML might come from Singapore; the images, fonts and scripts, which are most of the bytes, come from Kolkata or Dhaka. A basic CDN plan is free from the major providers, and we put one in front of every site we host.

For sites with visitors abroad, tour operators, exporters, hotels, the CDN is also what makes a Bhutan-hosted site tolerable for someone in Zurich. Without it, every one of their requests crosses the same limited international links in the other direction.

What matters more than location

The things that decide whether hosting is good are boring, and none of them is the flag on the data centre.

If a hosting plan, local or foreign, cannot answer all six, its price is not the price. Our hosting is from Nu. 3,500 a year and answers all six; that is what the money is for.

Nobody has ever lost a site because the server was in the wrong country. Plenty of people have lost one because nobody had a backup.

TLS, briefly

Every site needs HTTPS. Browsers mark sites without it as not secure, and forms on them leak. Certificates from Let’s Encrypt are free and renew themselves every 90 days if the host is set up properly. If a provider quotes for an SSL certificate as a line item, ask why.

The payment question

This is the part that decides more hosting choices in Bhutan than latency ever has.

Foreign hosting providers bill in US dollars, monthly or yearly, to a card. Most small businesses in Bhutan do not hold a card that settles in foreign currency, and the ones that do find it cumbersome to keep such payments going year after year. The result, which we see often, is a site that vanishes because a card expired, the renewal email went to a former employee, and nobody could pay the provider directly.

Local providers take Nu. by mBoB, MyPay or bank transfer, which is easy. The trade-off is a smaller choice of providers, fewer features and, in our experience, weaker backup and update practice unless you check.

The middle path is the one most of our clients take. We host on infrastructure abroad with a CDN in front, we pay the provider, and we invoice the business in Nu. once a year, payable by mBoB or bank transfer. The renewal is never tied to a card that might stop working, and the account is documented so the business can take it over if it ever wants to.

When hosting in Bhutan is the right answer

There are real cases where the server should be in the country.

Some organisations are required to keep data in Bhutan. Government bodies, financial institutions and anything handling citizens’ records often have this written into a policy or a regulator’s guideline. If it applies to you, it settles the question.

Some sites must keep working when the international link does not. Internal tools, a school portal, an intranet used from an office in Thimphu: if the value is local and the international link has a bad day, a local server keeps serving. A CDN does not help here, because the edge is across the border.

Some clients simply prefer it, and if the provider can show backups, updates, TLS and a support number, that preference is fine. We will set it up. We will also put a CDN in front, because foreign visitors exist even for local businesses.

When abroad is the right answer

Everyone else. A business site for customers in Bhutan and abroad, a hotel, a shop, a consultancy, a portfolio: host in Mumbai or Singapore, put a CDN in front, keep the domain and the account in your own name, and pay in Nu. through someone who can pay the provider. The site will be fast in Thimphu and fast in Zurich, and it will still be there next year.

What we would check first

Before choosing a provider, in either country, ask to see a backup being restored. Ask what happens to the account if the provider closes. Ask for the support number and message it on a Sunday. The answers tell you more than the location does.

If you would rather hand the whole question to someone, our hosting service is the answer above, from Nu. 3,500 a year, quoted in writing.