DatoCMS currently hosts its data centralised in Europe. For us in Australia this causes the uncached query times to be very slow. I’d love to choose Dato as our CMS of choice but the response times, which can be 500-800ms are not acceptable especially when Google is putting a lot of emphasis on website speed with Core Web Vitals. As we cache content on our side, the majority of requests to Dato would be when content is updated so the query cache is cleared.
It’d be great if there was a way to change the region in which a project is hosted. If you are on Google Cloud or AWS then they have a region in Sydney, Australia, which would make performance much better.
I know this would be a large effort to add as a feature, but I’m adding it into this forum in case you get to add it at some time.
Hey @jordie if you are using GraphQL the calls will be cached and served from the CDN. So already from now you should be able to get consistently data under 100ms.
The only problem that you are still going to face is on the CMS UI, where the editors must use our REST API that is in Europe only for now.
If you have specific use cases that you would like to discuss, feel free to comment here or book a call with me here: Calendly - DatoCMS if the hours are impossible for you, book the closest slot to when it’s good for you and I can move it a couple hours towards your timezone!
If we move closer to choosing DatoCMS, I’ll definitely hook up a time to chat, thanks.
From what I recall when I last checked in with the DatoCMS team, the whole CDN cache is purged whenever an update to a content item is made. Our editors are continually making content changes and updates throughout the day so the CDN would end up being nearly unused, so I can’t use CDN timings as a benchmark of performance.
If you have some sort of feature request list, I’d love to add a +1 to being able to host the data in another region. It’d make you stand out from the rest of the other CMS SaaS platforms, as no one has hosting in Australia and latency is one of the biggest pain points for Australia + NZ.
Edit: Just found the old slack message I sent and you mentioned it’s a limitation of Heroku datacenters, so that’s understandable. Thanks for your reply, I may be in touch soon.
@jordie sorry for the late reply here, but just to add a comment on CDN invalidation. We only invalidates the data that has changed, not the entire cache.
We get on average a cache hit ratio of 90%, so it should be good also in Australia + NZ.
But still, we know it’s a very important feature and we’ll surely consider that in the future.
I just want to point out that the server location is also a big issue for many of our clients. We started working with DatoCMS with a few clients and they/we love it. Unfortunately, most of our client will refuse to even consider it because they have very strict data policies that will not allow fo data to be stored outside of Canada.
