A question people often ask themselves when choosing a hosting provider is, “Where should I host my server?” Many people feel that it is important that the host be physically located close to them, or close to their customer base. Although it can be argued that hosting locally can improve local search engine results (this is unlikely), the main reason most people think they should host locally is largely ungrounded. This is because there is very little correlation between transfer speed or load times and the physical location of a server. Much more important is the amount of hops between your server and your customers, but I’ll get into more of that in a bit.
The circumference of the earth is 24,901.463 miles. This means that theoretically speaking, you can get to any part of the earth (by traveling in a straight line along the surface) in 12,451 miles or less. Since data sent over this distance is done so via light on a fiber-optic cable, we can use the speed of light to calculate how long it takes data to make this trek:
(12450.7315Miles/1)*(1 hour/670616629 Miles)*(3600000 ms/1 hour)=(66.838 ms)
This means that in an ideal world, where you were on the north pole, and your server was on the south pole (and assuming your server can instantly process data, which it can’t) you could access a website hosted on the other side of the planet in .132 seconds(66.8 ms there and back). This is less than half the time it takes you to blink.
This means, at least in a theoretical sense, that the physical distance has virtually no effect on transmission speed. The majority of transit time is actually created when your information gets off a cable, is processed by a router, and is then sent back out through another cable. This is what is commonly referred to as a ‘hop’. Trace-routes and pings are the easiest way to determine the speed and “distance-away” of your prospective server. Although some forms of routing can in fact hide hops from such simple utilities, you can still estimate how many of these your data encounters by performing a trace-route, and get an overall feel for your total transit time by using the ping command.
So next time you are wondering where you should host, make the decision using pings and trace-routes instead of miles!
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