3 days ago
I am building and scaling a B2B digital agency on Railway that onboards local offline businesses online in India. I currently run 2 SaaS platforms and multiple local business applications on Railway.
While I absolutely love Railway's simplicity, Git-driven workflow, and pricing model, the lack of a local Indian region is becoming a major blocker for our growth.
Currently, our infrastructure is forced to run out of the Southeast Asia (Singapore) region. While this is physically the closest option, it adds a baseline 50ms to 120ms of round-trip network latency for our end-users in major Indian Tier 1 tech hubs like Gurgaon (Delhi NCR), Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.
For B2B local business applications (such as real-time point-of-sale systems, local inventory management, and fast-loading customer dashboards), this latency creates a noticeable lag that impacts user adoption and operational efficiency.
Why this is critical for Railway’s Growth
- Massive Market Demand: India represents one of the fastest-growing developer and startup ecosystems in the world. Thousands of indie hackers, agency owners, and SaaS builders want to move away from complex AWS/GCP setups to Railway but cannot do so purely due to region-induced latency.
- Data Localization: Many Indian businesses and financial frameworks are tightening data residency requirements, making local data storage and computation a compliance necessity.
- Competitive Edge: Alternative platforms like Fly.io (bom region) and DigitalOcean (blr1 region) are winning over Indian developers strictly because they offer low-latency local nodes. Bringing an Indian region to Railway would make it the undisputed choice for developers in South Asia.
Proposed Solution
Please consider adding a managed infrastructure node or metal region in India. The top choices with excellent cloud peering architecture include:
- Mumbai (AWS ap-south-1 / GCP asia-south1)
- Bangalore (DigitalOcean / AWS ap-south-2)
- Delhi NCR / Gurgaon (GCP asia-south2)
Even a single edge or core deployment region in India would instantly resolve our latency bottlenecks, allowing us to migrate all our enterprise operations fully over to Railway.
0 Threads mention this feature
2 Replies
3 days ago
If Railway can only support one single region in India, we strongly recommend a location that balances latency for the entire subcontinent (North, South, East, and West):
- The "Middle of India" Choice (Hyderabad): Geographically, Hyderabad is the most strategic Tier-1 city. It sits centrally between the Northern metros (Delhi), Western financial hubs (Mumbai), and Southern tech corridors (Bangalore/Chennai). A server here would offer the most consistent "average" latency (approx. 20-40ms) to users across the entire country, unlike Delhi (which lags for the South) or Bangalore (which lags for the North).
- The "Connectivity" Choice (Mumbai): While on the West Coast, Mumbai handles ~70% of India’s data traffic due to its subsea cable landings. It is the industry standard for the "first" region in India.
My specific vote: Hyderabad (ap-south-2 equivalent) for the best pan-India balance, or Mumbai (ap-south-1 equivalent) for maximum raw throughput.
a day ago
You can simply stop using the railway if the Indian region is mandatory for you, Saas. Check this one-year-old thread and their two-month-old reply.
https://station.railway.com/feedback/india-region-4e28fcf8
There are many threads from the past few years.
They don’t want to add any Indian regions unless they receive enough responses on that thread, which is unlikely to happen, just like the render thread https://feedback.render.com/features/p/mumbai-region.
Check this thread; it was six years ago, and there is still no Indian region. It will happen the same for the railway as well.
The reason why no one asks for an Indian region on the railway is that people who desperately need an Indian region won’t even use the railway, so there is very little demand that the railway team thinks is the only demand.
@brody, can you try sending a mail to all your railway users asking for a new Indian region addition and act accordingly?