Thanks. The ICP is the crux of the issue with the hosting at the moment. We're working on it.... red tape is enormous and we don't want to rock the boat too early.
understandable.
so where will you be putting those servers?
if you're serving the mainland, then this is critical (us and eu are really out of the question)
i've done extensive testing in hong kong and singapore (still need to test from taiwan)
hong kong had the best performance, but signapore had the best infrastructure.
On the blockchain.info api... Let's see. It will be costing me more than self hosting since they charge transaction fees on moves. The record to date of people running their own isn't great. I'm prepared to fall back on my own.
no it is not. but there in lies the challenge.
not a c programmer so i can't make any sense of bitcoind, but check out
bitcoinj as well as
bitcoinjs-server.
True.
I began with a set of VPSes in Japan, but actually found connection to west-coast US much better. I think a lot of locals use nearby VPSes as proxies (I know I do), and so connections, particularly https, seem to be getting throttled and blocked more often. I got blocked due to someone else on my same IP range -- didn't bode well.
Serving through CDN, I see sub-1-second page loads over 3G to W coast US. All assets will be served from CDN edge locations so it should be OK. How that scales to full-time trading will be the real test though.
For comparison, BTCChina, when not behind CloudFlare, seems to be on an east-coast Linode.
For the Bitcoin server -- I looked; we began with a self-hosted solution. However, the only secure way I am really comfortable with is a dedicated server under my own control -- even whole-disk encryption means nothing on a VPS. The intermediate code is relatively backend-agnostic, so I can always go back to that route if needs be. Will possibly be adding alt currencies down the road, so would need to self-host anyway. I think the biggest draw for blockchain.info is that we plan to market it as a secure solution -- are new users more likely to trust a(nother) new exchange, or one of the biggest players on the block? I know where my money would go. It will help me sleep at night too...
I guess you will have to get your site online while waiting for the ICP, that's what people normally do.