Data travels through fiber optic cables at roughly 200,000 km/s — about 2/3 the speed of light. A request from London to a New York server (5,500 km) takes at least 28ms for the round trip, plus routing overhead bringing real-world latency to 70-90ms. A London-to-London connection is 1-5ms. For interactive websites, every 100ms of latency reduces conversions by 7%. Choose a VPS location that minimizes the distance to your primary audience.
The Physics of Latency
Data travels through fiber optic cables at roughly 200,000 km/s — about 2/3 the speed of light. A request from London to a New York server (5,500 km) takes at least 28ms for the round trip, plus routing overhead bringing real-world latency to 70-90ms. A London-to-London connection is 1-5ms. For interactive websites, every 100ms of latency reduces conversions by 7%. Choose a VPS location that minimizes the distance to your primary audience.
Data Sovereignty Considerations
Where your data physically resides determines which laws govern it. EU businesses handling personal data must comply with GDPR, often requiring data to stay within the EU. US HIPAA has specific requirements about data handling. Some industries (government, finance) have strict data residency requirements. A VPS gives you explicit choice over data location — unlike some cloud providers that may replicate data across regions. For FastNode’s UK and European data centers, you know exactly where your data lives.
Multi-Region Strategies
If your audience spans multiple regions, consider: a CDN in front of your VPS to serve static content from edge locations globally, or multiple VPS instances in different regions with DNS-based geographic routing. Database replication across regions provides disaster recovery and read-performance benefits. For most businesses with a primary market in one region, a single well-located VPS with a CDN provides excellent global performance at minimal cost.
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