How much does VPS location matter?
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Hi,
I am moving away from shared hosting in favour of Cloudron. Trying to decide on which VPS provider to use. My intention was to use DigitalOcean in the UK. Three of the key sites I am moving are relevant to the UK market more than anything.
That said I see Hetzner Cloud pricing is so much cheaper. Not that I am a cheapskate by any means but I am wondering whether it really makes that much difference whether I go with DigitalOcean in the UK or Hetzner in Germany.
All sites will be using Cloudflare.
I am guessing here that the only likely difference will be that it will be slightly longer to load the site and pages if hosting in Germany vs the UK but enough for visitors to notice? Not sure.
I suspect there are a lot more experienced folks around here that will know more about this than I do so any views Welcome.
Thanks.
Lee
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@leew the physical location as such only matters with regards to the ping from the client location to the server location. Given that the distance as such from UK to Germany is not really that huge, I would assume it is not an issue at all. To make sure, you could spin up an instance at Hetzner and DigitalOcean and just run a few ping tests to those IPs to get a sense of the difference.
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@leew just to add, if you wanted an eco VPS ie powered by renewables, then some are listed in my eco VPS spreadsheet here https://ud.coop/ecovps
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@girish All of my sites are just info blogs, a forum and a custom-built history site. They will be fine pretty much anywhere.
Going to go with Hetzner, as I say, not a cheapskate, was willing to pay Digital Ocean $40 per month but Hetzner Cloud gets as good if not better reviews and for much less money. Seems daft not to
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I switched this week from DO to Contabo and my initial concern was that Contabo would be overselling their VPS's and I would end up with a slow server. I'm glad to report that my VPS M NVME server is much "snappier" than it was with DigitalOcean. I was on the 2vCPU/4GB RAM DO plan (SSD) so it's not really a fair comparison (SSD vs NVME).
Unfortunately, my Contabo VPS had some downtime today (~5 mins) and support replied to my email within 1 min (literally). The server was back up by the time I replied back. I've been with DO (through a managed host and then as a direct customer) for over 8 years and I regret not exploring other options during that time. Not that I have anything bad to say about DO, it's just that there are other amazing hosts out there. HTH.
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@humptydumpty Indeed, it's great to see competition here for small business and personal use. Especially support and pricing are very competitive these days with the smaller VPS providers. I feel many people fall for the "big cloud" (aws/azure/gcs) trap and really struggle with their interfaces and complexity.
We actually use a variety of providers - DO, Linode, Ionos, Hetzner, Netcup and honestly I can't think of anything bad about any of them.
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@girish said in How much does VPS location matter?:
We actually use a variety of providers - DO, Linode, Ionos, Hetzner, Netcup and honestly I can't think of anything bad about any of them.
AFAIK out of that list only Hetzner and Netcup run on 100% renewable energy. Given the urgency and serverity of the climate (and ecological) emergency I'd suggest that any server not 100% powered by renewables is in fact very bad
(I also don't really like the fact they are all run for private profit which ultimately means they worsen inequality which is bad for everyone, but that's a whole other point/ subject
bring on servers.coop! although that's still in very early days) -
I may have spoke positively about Contabo way too soon. My VPS was down again today for 5-8 mins and I received the same reply (damn copy/paste) when I asked as to what the cause is.
Unfortunately we experienced some technical difficulties with the Host-Server-SystemIn plain English, what the heck is that?
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@humptydumpty Essentially - The host server that runs all the different VMs went down. (or some other technical issue.)
Little diagram for explanation: The VM part is your VPS. One host server (host machine, server host, etc) can run many VMs (VPS) under itself - If the host has an issue, depending on the issue, the VM will experience it as well.
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@leew Using Hetzner from the UK, Jersey actually. It's super-fast, you really won't notice any difference for any hosting within about 3h of timezone in either direction. My recommendation; give it a go, I don't think you'll have any issues or regrest.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@leew I run my UK-focussed Cloudron instance from a NetCup server in Germany, and I see no issues whatsoever in terms of performance vs a Digital Ocean or Linode London server.
Not a technical metrics-based response, just a user-experience perspective. Hope it helps. -
@marcusquinn said in How much does VPS location matter?:
It's super-fast, you really won't notice any difference for any hosting within about 3h of timezone in either direction.
Distance surely, not timezones --- unless you are talking only in east<> west terms.
Bet you didn't intend to include South Africa!
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@roundhouse1924 True. Also bear in mind EU hosting keeps your GDPR obligations simpler.
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@timconsidine That's very useful, thanks.
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Do not think the geolocation matters with a Virtual private server(VPS). All you need is a quick, consistent, and smooth internet connection in VPS. A client likewise must have a decent Internet connection. I had VPS for ircd and I used to give shell access, there was no issue with that. The exhibition on applications was smooth and acceptable. Is it true that you are encountering any issues on the VPS you have or purchased?
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