Making Techrights Faster Down Under (Australia and New Zealand)
Historically, Techrights had many Australians involved. The logo of the site (as shown above) was also done by an Australian; we communicated in IRC and privately, he was good at those sorts of things. At one point someone in Tasmania was trying to set up a mirror in Australia and registered a domain for that purpose.
We must recognise that our "no-outsourcing" stance results in slowness for Australians:
Australia is many hops away from the server and we don't have CDNs (we don't plan to; outsourcing is bad), but if somebody in Australia wants to help shorten the "round-trip" (2 seconds above, compared to 0.1 second from London), please get is touch with us, e.g. in IRC. The only way to make the site faster internationally is a localised (geographically speaking) node. Japan is also 2 seas away from us, but access is faster because the path is more robust and overall distance shorter.
Acknowledging that outsourcing is bad isn't the same as conceding speed is unimportant. But there's more to life than speed. █
Image source: New Year Pyrotechnics Over Sydney Harbor