Member OP
Same experience from Mumbai. 175ms average from my Airtel line, 182ms from my VPS here. If there's a Mumbai PoP I'm not reaching it.
Anyone actually seen sub-50ms from Asia on Contabo's premium tier? That's the question.
Member
I test from my home in Jakarta and also from Biznet. Same result bro, 170ms+. My users in Surabaya complain also.
I think maybe Contabo premium anycast is only working for Europe and USA. For Asia they have server but not anycast routing yet.
That's not what "global anycast" means. Either they announce from all PoPs or they don't. What you're describing is geo-DNS or split horizon, which is a different product.
I've seen this before. Provider buys IP transit in region but doesn't negotiate local peering. Traffic lands in Singapore or Tokyo then backhauls to wherever the actual VM lives. The IP is "present" in Asia for announcement purposes but the path is garbage. Check for yourself: https://ipinfo.io
You're not getting real anycast under $15. Vultr's $5 tier is single region. BuyVM has anycast but only on their Las Vegas and New York nodes last I checked, and that's two cities same as Contabo.
If you need APAC you need a provider with actual VMs in APAC, not anycast theater. HostHatch Tokyo is $6, GreenCloudVPS Singapore starts at $4. Route your DNS by region and call it a day.
Member
This. Anycast is hard. GeoDNS is boring and works. RAJ, what are you actually serving? If it's HTTP you can do latency-based routing with Route53 or Cloudflare load balancing for cheaper than managing anycast yourself.
Member
Thanks for the looking glass tip. I found HE.net and Telia have them.
So if I understand right, Contabo might have a server in Singapore but my traffic goes to Germany anyway because of how BGP works? That's wild.
Member
Not "because of how BGP works," because of how their specific BGP policy works. They could prepend or set communities to keep traffic local. They apparently don't, or don't consistently.
I don't work for Contabo but I did support at a competitor. "Global anycast" in marketing often means "we have the IPs ready in all regions" while operations means "we haven't turned up local routing tables yet." Misalignment between teams.
This thread is making me paranoid about my own setup. I have a Contabo VPS in Nuremberg that I thought was fine for UK users. Now I'm wondering if I should move.
Is there actually a London PoP for the cheap tier or is that premium only?
Member OP
Premium only from what I can see. Their "Cloud VPS" page shows Nuremberg and St. Louis for the base tier. London, Singapore, Sydney etc are all on the premium tab.
I might just eat the cost and put my APAC clients on HostHatch Tokyo directly. $6 vs whatever Contabo premium is, probably similar.
Member
Tested from IIJ and NTT in Osaka. 165ms and 171ms respectively. Traceroute dies in DE-CIX Frankfurt both times. So the path is definitely not staying in Asia.
Contabo has a Tokyo datacenter per their site — https://contabo.com — but either it's not serving this IP space or they're tunneling everything back to Europe. Either way the result is the same.
