Server Location

Hi,

Pretty sure I know the answer to this, but anyway would like people’s thoughts…

If a UK firm launched another company in Spain, and had a second website for this, I presume it’s best to find a Spanish host?

The website is currently on the same server as their UK site, in London.

Any Spanish looking glass pages I can find put ping to this server at about 30ms - my laptop (UK) on Wifi shows 25ms ping.

Would it be advisable to get a Spanish host, or use something like Cloudflare? Or is 30ms low enough not to worry? My thoughts were 30ms is from other server looking glass, home users in Spain probably wouldn’t get that?

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

I think that the Internet infrastructure has evolved good enough so that you don’t need to have your host next door in order to get a good latency. EU to EU should be a safe bet, I don’t see the need to have the host in the same country as your target audience… sure, don’t have your host in Asia if you target EU customers, but UK to Spain should be good enough (25-30ms is a good latency for a website). You’re most likely going to hit other bottlenecks before this latency will play a role in your website’s loading time.

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Nowdays just have the host in the same continent as where your client / visitors are coming from, having it in the same country is not needed. U.K for spanish visitors is already too good.

Having the site on the same continent as most visitors is enough.

Cheers guys.

The 30ms was from hosting looking glass pages, so I was just concerned home ISP users might not see it so well.

It is fine the way it is. Don’t worry about it, worry about Brexit to not get extra taxes.

I’m just throwing the idea for comments. I have no personal experience, but maybe Cloudflare could help if they have pop in Spain?

I was going to suggest https://pulse.turbobytes.com/ which runs tests from residential connections, but they don’t have any agents in Spain.

30ms ping is totally fine though. IMO even 100ms is fine for a basic site - that’s still faster than blinking your eyes :slight_smile:

Proper implementation of hreflang and well-translated pages are going to be more important - if it’s the same company/site. But for hosting a second site, I agree, sub-100ms is fine. You could host both in NYC and it’d still probably be fine.

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I think it really depends on the network speeds; the internet has evolved and sometimes I’m stunned to find that distance data centers connect better than in-country.

It’s simple - lots of DCs are not big enough to have IX presence, they are often single homed to some transit provider.

And transit providers like Cogent have pretty much zero IX presence themselves. This results in traffic to local end user ISPs getting routed through possibly multiple transits - latency goes up, bandwidth (sometimes) goes down. Especially if the end user ISP are asshats who do double paid peering only.

I have a site primarily used by Australian users, yet it was hosted in Las Vegas (BuyVM) until just recently when I moved it to an Australian provider. I never got complaints about the load time even though it’s a ~200ms RTT between Australia and west-coast USA. I think because the site is quite fast to load, and also a lot of Australians use US-based sites so they’re used to the latency. That’s actually one thing I noticed when moving to the USA - Everything feels so much faster given how many servers are located on the west coast of the USA.

Hosting in Australia was ridiculously expensive until recently (last 6-7 years or so) - Now we have Vultr, OVH, FlowVPS, BinaryLane, RansomIT and others.

I’ve read that sometimes in-country interconnections are actually quite bad, for example in China: Network preferred relays · Issue #140 · zerotier/ZeroTierOne · GitHub

here at China we have two large ISPs, China Unicom and China Telecom, and the connectivity between them can be very bad (worse than relaying through master nodes). However, there are some cloud hosting service that has connectivity to both worlds, and relaying through them can be very fast.

Thanks for the info guys.

Guess I was a little behind on my knowledge about locations mattering.

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