Determining the Best AWS Region and Availability Zone for Indian Users

According to AWS official website, “There are 77 Availability Zones across 24 regions worldwide.”  The nearest geographic AWS Region to India is Mumbai (ap-south-1). Only in ‘ap-south-1’ region, there are three AWS Availability Zones (also called Subnets):

  1. ap-south-1a,
  2. ap-south-1b,
  3. ap-south-1c.

So here the question is that, “Choose Which of these three Availability Zone, so that your EC2 instance can perform better in India?

To solve this question, We did some tests on a WordPress website for all the three Availability Zones, So that you can choose The Best AWS Region and Availability Zone for low latency in India.

Here their result is given in these three pictures:

1. ap-south-1a:

AP-SOUTH-1A: AWS Availability Zone for India
AP-SOUTH-1A

2. ap-south-1b:

AP-SOUTH-1B: AWS Availability Zone for India
AP-SOUTH-1B

3. ap-south-1c:

AP-SOUTH-1C: AWS Availability Zone for India
AP-SOUTH-1C

You can clearly see in the above results, who is the winner. I mean which Availability Zone is best for India. All these tests were done on KeyCDN. Its Indian server is in Bangalore. So in the results, Bangalore is showing.

Below the final result is given for The Best Availability Zone for India:

Availability Zone DNS CONNECT TLS TTFB
AP-SOUTH-1A 32.22 ms 69.72 ms 81.19 ms 260.03 ms
AP-SOUTH-1B 34.99 ms 70.88 ms 81.8 ms 267.75 ms
AP-SOUTH-1C 35.38 ms 39.95 ms 52.38 ms 357.43 ms

So looking at these results, we can say that ‘ap-south-1a‘ is the winner in AWS Availability Zones for India. But there is not significant difference between these Availability Zones. That’s why you can choose any region for your server.

Meaning of the words that are used in above table:

DNS: Domain Name System, translates human readable domain names (for example, www.timesbuzzer.com) to machine readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0. 2.44). ~ AWS.

CONNECT: Connection Time, is used for SSL Connection Time (for HTTPs).

TLS: Transport Layer Security, is a widely adopted security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data security for communications over the Internet. A primary use case of TLS is encrypting the communication between web applications and servers, such as web browsers loading a website. ~ Cloudflare.

TTFB: Time to first byte, is a metric for determining the responsiveness of a web server. It measures the amount of time between creating a connection to the server and downloading the contents of a web page. ~ Stack Path.


Note: All these tests were done on KeyCDN. It is a high performance content delivery network (CDN). They also provide to check the Website Speed, and Performnce Test.

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