My startup is located in Europe where most of our current users are.
I'm looking for a host that will allow us to scale to the US and Asia without latency taking its toll on performance.
Does the cloud solve the distance = latency problem?
If not, Where would be the ideal hosting location for a growing startup?
Some data: Asp.net 3.5 SQL 2005 Jquery (lots of Ajax) MVC
Thanks
The Cloud is just an abstraction. It doesn't affect the underlying physical nature of the servers running your code and hosting your data. If the systems storing your data are a long way from your users there will some latency, no matter how you access them.
Most Cloud providers allow you to choose where you want your data - for example, Amazon S3 lets you choose to store your data in either the US or Europe - but no provider is going to be able to magically store all your data in multiple locations simultaneously.
If you want the benefit of multiple data centres you'd have to allow simultaneous updates at each location and there is no way to synchronise such updates without knowledge of the business logic of the application, so you're going to have to write some code to do this.
You're still going to have a look at what each Cloud provider offers and work out how each can help solve your problems, but you're going to have to do some work yourself.