[LightDestory]

Reading the post about the Cancellation of VPSs 15 & 16, I noticed that one of major aspect of their unpopularity its their geographical location, the US.
As my title says, I am new to the VPS Wolrd, I don't know why something such as geographical location should be important.
Can you help me understand it?

For what I know, the geographical location affects the latency. As example, I am from Italy, to be specific from Sicily (south of Italy), and these are the results of my pinging test:

• Milan => min:28ms max:40ms avg:30.4ms (jitter 1.3ms)
  
• Frankfurt => min:42ms max:68ms avg:44.8ms (jitter 2.2ms)
  
• Paris => min:54ms max:93ms avg:56ms (jitter 3.6ms)
  
• Moscow=> min:95ms max:157ms avg:97ms (jitter 9.2ms)
  
• New York => min:124ms max:147ms avg:126.4ms (jitter 2ms)
  
• Toronto => min:136ms max:166ms avg:138ms (jitter 2.7ms)
  
• Miami => min:157ms max:171ms avg:159.2ms (jitter 1.3ms)
  
• Tokyo => min:303ms max:306ms avg:304ms (jitter 0.6ms)
  
• Hong Kong=> min:287ms max:298ms avg:289ms (jitter 1.2ms)
  
• Sevilla => min:64ms max:147ms avg:79.9ms (jitter 5.8ms)
  
• Mumbai => min:177ms max:182ms avg:178ms (jitter 0.9ms)
  
  

These tests are just a list of my own latency while communicating with these locations.
So if you want to run a game server, latency is one of the most important thing you have to think about. I am not very expert about game hosting, but... does a %number_between_50_to_100%ms make a difference? 
Except for unrealistic locations such as Tokyo and Hong Kong, all the latencies are below 200ms. For no-ping based games I think, correct me if I am wrong, it is a acceptable delay.
On a lot of games, if they show the ping between you and the game server, it is usually displayed with 3 colors:

• Green => Ping below 100ms
  
• Yellow => Ping below 200-250ms
  
• Red => Ping above 200-250ms
  

I played a lot of games with server hosted in America (MMORPG, Minecraft, MOBA) and my experience wasn't so bad.
What do you think about it?

For me, someone scared by new European laws, a VPS located on Europe can be a solution of the "user's data location" issue. But recently I read that it doesn't matter where the data is stored, it can be in US, Europe, China or anywhere but if the data belongs to a customer residing in EU, then you HAVE TO BE COMPLAINT TO GDPR anyway.
There are no escapes, unfortunately.

For general purpose usage, such as website hosting, data hosting, webapp container, I don't see any problem with a latency below 200ms. Does it matter? I interact with website outside Europe that doesn't own a CDN and I have never experienced a long await.
Well, If I try to load a japanese website... I can leave to take a coffee and still need to wait.

So what do you thing about? Do you prefer VPS located in Europe or you don't mind it?
Let's discuss about it, vote the poll and be polite!

[Mashiro]

The right geographical location for your server can be important for many reasons but it is usually for you to choose the right ones depending on the purpose of the server, your target audience and other factors.

- High performance Internet applications (services running over the Internet instead of being hosted in a LAN) not only require a lot of (fast) processing power and other resources but also a latency as low as possible. Remember that for every request that is sent the network latency is added as one factor that adds up to how fast you will get your data processed. Running such applications on a powerful server but with high latency will yield rather bad results due to long loading times caused alone by network latency (despite of having so much - fast - processing power).

At the company I work for we have created a big LAN network over Internet by using fibre between all of our locations and a data center in Bavaria. The latency between all our locations is fairly low <10ms while the latency to the data center, because it is way more far away, is around 15ms. Considering that we use this as a LAN network to unify all locations the low latency is very important. Sure the latency are not as low as inside a real LAN but it is much lower than running Site to Site VPNs over a normal Internet connection where the latency between the different locations already would be 30 - 50ms (closest location to most far away location).

The same actually even applies to as simple things as web hosting. Every request is accompanied by network latency. Hence why a Japanese/Chinese/Korean site that is truely hosted in these counries will take forever to load for people from Europe or other countries compared to Asian countries around the mentioned countries. Imagine loading a site with 100 requests for various resources (css, js, html, pictures, fonts...) and to every of that request add 300ms... that's already 30 seconds of network latency without having even considered the fact that a picture might have a big size and the transfer speed is low because of unoptimized routes and bad bandwidth carriers. Also did we even consider DNS resolution latency, yet? Nope, we didn't!

- Game servers are one subject you mentioned. Not all kind of game servers need low latency. FPS game do need a low latency while something like Minecraft might not need a low latency to work properly. A low latency matters in FPS because of the reaction time. You have a higher latency = you are slower than others = you lose. So here it is up to you what you require in the end and what kind of game server you want to run.

- "Freedom" is another point why people choose certain locations. One part of that surely is the data protection but the other parts are things such as "free speech", "ignoring DMCA requests", "ignoring requests from foreign (especially US) authorities" and etc. There are many things that people want to do that are not allowed in almost everywhere on the world except in some certain exotic countries. It's sometimes the Internet freedom that the people seek that decides where they host their servers. Laws play a key role here.

- Staying anonymous while retaining as much of your Internet speed and performance as possible is one reason why I for example choose a server nearby if I want to setup a VPN. However again this is related to a) performance and b) freedom of the Internet.

- Quality of service and Internet is maybe one of the most important things. While nowadays we can get hosting almost everywhere the quality of the available traffic and bandwidth is not always top notch. The prices are sometimes very expensive. Even big ISPs might not be ready to fork out more money to buy more or better bandwidth for their customers. All of this is leading due to poor quality of service.

My ISP which is Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) is one of those that despite earning a lot of money due to owning all of the DSL lines in Germany and a lot of fibre... thus being able to sell service at actually pretty high prices... well, they didn't bother to extend bandwidth carrier contracts and buy more bandwidth volume some years ago. And that with some of the most important bandwidth carries for transit between Europe and the US. What does this mean? This means that everything hosted in the US was loading very slow, customers had many issues with using services such as Youtube, Netflix and etc. Even inside Germany it was a disaster when DTAG didn't want to upgrade capacity with GTT... at the peak of the day I was getting speed rates of 30 - 100 KB/s inside Germany to big data centers such as Strato, Hetzner and etc. All of that because the DTAG transit via GTT was overloaded. I was hosting some sites at that time and the backup volume was getting bigger and bigger but the speed to slower and slower. Took me hours to backup a few sites at that rate.

TL;DR: latency is not the only important thing when choosing locations. Bandwidth carriers and their quality also matter. Certain ISPs use cheap traffic with unoptimized routes. Others use premium routes while charging a bit more. That's one of the reasons why sometimes a more close location might yield worse results than something more far away. I have experienced this with a Japanese ISP when using SoftEther VPN. I had only like 5% overall performance loss of my actual connection. Despite Germany - Japan being a huge distance everything loaded very snappy, Youtube videos at high resolutions were no issues and downloads were finished quickly.


There are of course way more reasons but I'm not going to list them all here now or this thread is going to be endless.

[Honey]

The main geographical issue I have with VPSes is the latency, specifically in games. My main usage on a server is to host websites/minecraft game servers, and so the ping from my location to my server matters the most to me. My main aim, sometiems even more important than specs, is to try and get a server that is decent in specs and as close to me as possible. This is why I left my VPS 9 in the favor of VPS 5(even tho VPS 5 is half the ram if compared with 9), as the ping difference is almost double, I get somewhere around 120 ms in EU and 350 ms in US.

[LightDestory]

The right geographical location for your server can be important for many reasons but it is usually for you to choose the right ones depending on the purpose of the server, your target audience and other factors.

- High performance Internet applications (services running over the Internet instead of being hosted in a LAN) not only require a lot of (fast) processing power and other resources but also a latency as low as possible. Remember that for every request that is sent the network latency is added as one factor that adds up to how fast you will get your data processed. Running such applications on a powerful server but with high latency will yield rather bad results due to long loading times caused alone by network latency (despite of having so much - fast - processing power).

At the company I work for we have created a big LAN network over Internet by using fibre between all of our locations and a data center in Bavaria. The latency between all our locations is fairly low <10ms while the latency to the data center, because it is way more far away, is around 15ms. Considering that we use this as a LAN network to unify all locations the low latency is very important. Sure the latency are not as low as inside a real LAN but it is much lower than running Site to Site VPNs over a normal Internet connection where the latency between the different locations already would be 30 - 50ms (closest location to most far away location).

The same actually even applies to as simple things as web hosting. Every request is accompanied by network latency. Hence why a Japanese/Chinese/Korean site that is truely hosted in these counries will take forever to load for people from Europe or other countries compared to Asian countries around the mentioned countries. Imagine loading a site with 100 requests for various resources (css, js, html, pictures, fonts...) and to every of that request add 300ms... that's already 30 seconds of network latency without having even considered the fact that a picture might have a big size and the transfer speed is low because of unoptimized routes and bad bandwidth carriers. Also did we even consider DNS resolution latency, yet? Nope, we didn't!

- Game servers are one subject you mentioned. Not all kind of game servers need low latency. FPS game do need a low latency while something like Minecraft might not need a low latency to work properly. A low latency matters in FPS because of the reaction time. You have a higher latency = you are slower than others = you lose. So here it is up to you what you require in the end and what kind of game server you want to run.

- "Freedom" is another point why people choose certain locations. One part of that surely is the data protection but the other parts are things such as "free speech", "ignoring DMCA requests", "ignoring requests from foreign (especially US) authorities" and etc. There are many things that people want to do that are not allowed in almost everywhere on the world except in some certain exotic countries. It's sometimes the Internet freedom that the people seek that decides where they host their servers. Laws play a key role here.

- Staying anonymous while retaining as much of your Internet speed and performance as possible is one reason why I for example choose a server nearby if I want to setup a VPN. However again this is related to a) performance and b) freedom of the Internet.

- Quality of service and Internet is maybe one of the most important things. While nowadays we can get hosting almost everywhere the quality of the available traffic and bandwidth is not always top notch. The prices are sometimes very expensive. Even big ISPs might not be ready to fork out more money to buy more or better bandwidth for their customers. All of this is leading due to poor quality of service.

My ISP which is Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) is one of those that despite earning a lot of money due to owning all of the DSL lines in Germany and a lot of fibre... thus being able to sell service at actually pretty high prices... well, they didn't bother to extend bandwidth carrier contracts and buy more bandwidth volume some years ago. And that with some of the most important bandwidth carries for transit between Europe and the US. What does this mean? This means that everything hosted in the US was loading very slow, customers had many issues with using services such as Youtube, Netflix and etc. Even inside Germany it was a disaster when DTAG didn't want to upgrade capacity with GTT... at the peak of the day I was getting speed rates of 30 - 100 KB/s inside Germany to big data centers such as Strato, Hetzner and etc. All of that because the DTAG transit via GTT was overloaded. I was hosting some sites at that time and the backup volume was getting bigger and bigger but the speed to slower and slower. Took me hours to backup a few sites at that rate.

TL;DR: latency is not the only important thing when choosing locations. Bandwidth carriers and their quality also matter. Certain ISPs use cheap traffic with unoptimized routes. Others use premium routes while charging a bit more. That's one of the reasons why sometimes a more close location might yield worse results than something more far away. I have experienced this with a Japanese ISP when using SoftEther VPN. I had only like 5% overall performance loss of my actual connection. Despite Germany - Japan being a huge distance everything loaded very snappy, Youtube videos at high resolutions were no issues and downloads were finished quickly.


There are of course way more reasons but I'm not going to list them all here now or this thread is going to be endless.

Your reply is mind-blowing. A lot of good information. You have explored almost every use/need of VPS. 
Thanks you for your time.

@Honey I think that 350ms is unplayable

[Honey]

Your reply is mind-blowing. A lot of good information. You have explored almost every use/need of VPS. 
Thanks you for your time.

@Honey I think that 350ms is unplayable

I'd say that depends on what game you're playing. Like, in CSGO, anything above 100/150 is hardly playable because of how the game works, that is mainly why Valve has game servers almost everywhere throughout the globe so players can have low latency, but in games like Minecraft, even on 300 ms I can mostly play fine provided the ping doesn't spike above 300, but yeah, generally 300 or above is not considered to be a good ping, but when the restriction is imposed geographically then there's really not much you can do.

[harry_v]

The location of a server can have an impact on a variety of factors, including latency, cost, and security, and privacy.
Some of these conversations will be generalizations, which is unavoidable. Some faraway servers will respond quickly and have minimal latency, whereas others, although being close by, will respond slowly.
Some servers in a distant country will be exorbitantly priced, whereas ones right next door may be reasonably priced.

However, there are a few variables to consider while choosing a server location:

#1 Latency
This is the most important one. The time it takes for data to travel between your site and users might be affected by the location of your server. When you're trying to load material or process a series of requests, even if it's only seconds or milliseconds, that time adds up.

#2 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Indirectly, the location of your server can affect your Google page ranks. Websites that take too long to respond have been known to be penalized in the rankings. Google understands that they must respond to the searcher's inquiry, but they must also do it in a timely manner. And, according to Google's own study, a suitable amount of time, at least for mobile users, is roughly 3 seconds. You might obtain a better score if you can load in under 3 seconds rather than spinning your wheels for longer. While server location isn't the sole factor that influences load speed, it does have an impact on latency and can alter access to your site from various areas.

#3 Google’s Geological Rankings
If you utilize Google's Webmaster tool, it doesn't matter where your website is located. Even if you have servers in Tokyo or Rio, the Google Webmaster tool will allow you to target customers who are geographically located in western Los Angeles. If you're not utilizing Webmaster to geographically target specific users and you're using a.com or.org domain, Google may use the location of your server to acquire geographical information. There are a few things you can do to avoid being misunderstood by search engines. You can put your servers in a relevant area for your users and then use the location of the servers, but there's no reason why you should.

#4 Cost
Putting your server in a different country could make hosting your website more or less expensive. Because certain nations have lower energy prices and taxes, placing your servers there will cost you less or more money.
Varying states and areas may have different tax rates. You'll classify these costs as hardware or operating costs depending on whether you buy or rent server space, which can alter your tax structures.

#5 Privacy and Security
Many countries have distinct privacy and information laws that control how governments can access information and how they can't. This means that certain sites will seek the protection of a specific political-legal jurisdiction while avoiding others. Of course, some governments are unconcerned whether your servers are located in another country. Even if the site is hosted outside of their country, they may still take action.