Accessibility in Pacific Asia

Almost all of my pre-sales questions have been answered browsing through the site. There is one vital issue why I want to leave my current host, and it doesn’t have anything to do with their server load (although that’s a problem too) and their service. In general, I’m a low-maintenance customer anyways. I couldn’t find any reference to this issue here.

My applications are stock photography, travel, and forums – using CMS’s like PN, Joomla and Coppermine. My contributors reside in Europe and in Pacific Asia, most of them in the Philippines. I’m there myself about 5 months per year. Connectivity is lousy, measured by Western standards and most of the contributors connect through net cafés. Quality varies a lot.

Last fall I noticed that none of my domains, with the same hoster, could be accessed from within the Philippines (except from a large provider in Manila). Now they are, but they are just unreliable. It’s not a matter of general connectivity since Yahoo and Google came up well, in every instance. It’s not a matter of scripting or server load since my landing page is low-graphics client-side HTML. It’s not a matter of a “bad” hoster since my sites load well from the US and from Europe. So what is it? Peering?

I don’t want to move to a local provider in the Philippines since on my stock photography site customers mainly come from within the US. Mirroring would be too expensive.

Now my question is this, how do sites hosted with you load in the Philippines? As the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, could you refer me some sites on HostGator that are hosted on the Baby plan? I know this is a tricky issue because of privacy, but I’m sure there must be at least a few general interest sites that don’t mind their domain is communicated. I can let these sites “test” from different parts of the Archipelago to check their speed. And if that’s OK, I’m moving ;-)
[PS - i found 2 HostGator sites on Google already, and they load well from Mindanao and Luzon]

[quietFinn]

in http://www.hostgator.com/s you find a list of HG servers (not all servers are there, for ex. the one I am in is not).