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Comments
Follow the crowd.
Latency is still a limitation that can never be ignored, streaming RDP on 10ms and 200ms can make a big difference
Thanks. To be honest, I thought as much but don't want to face a server migration. That and Hetzner not offering anything in North America.
Just normal website traffic? I'd say not as much as it used to, considering an increase in internet speeds, optimized traffic routes and sites using CDNs. It's not 1995 anymore.
I think it's still common practice to host close to your audience. Even if the difference is not something you or they could notice, it's something I think Google (for example) takes into consideration. (Or is that a myth? I never really got into SEO stuff)
Latency matters based on the application you are planning to host.
For example:
I own two project
1) Image Host
I care about latency over here as my client wants to see all the images instantly. If the image size is just 100kb and if there is a latency of 200ms, you can find a noticeable difference in loading.
So I have servers in 20+ countries and so the average latency is less than 20ms
2) File Host
I did not care about latency on this project, because the average file size is more than 100mb which means, 200ms doesn't make a difference when the whole download time will exceed more than 1sec.
So in general for any task that completes in 1 second, you will find a noticeable difference.
For regular websites, put it behind cloudflare. Done.
@Arkas
You don't have to move over if you don't want to. You can use a CDN or accelerator to help in the static parts that don't need to hit your origin. Cloudflare is free or reverse proxy from a small VPS in the US.
I think I really need to look into cloudflare, I don't know much about it. I've heard about it, just never really bothered, plus I didn't know it was free.
If it is just a website, then Cloudflare is more than enough as they have servers in all the countries and also they have lots of optimization in their control panel which will make your website loads much more faster.
They will cache your js, css, images and serve from the nearby nodes.
Yes, fucking yes.
Why do you think people came up with Anycast and CDN's?
If your css is like 2kb, do you need to care then? I guess not.
But is your css really 2kb? likely no.
It's not only static websites, I have a few forums as well on the server.
location matters!
To minimize latency, would you consider a server in the core of the Earth?
I calculated that you can get 21ms one-way latency from anywhere in the world.
How do you ensure the closest server has the requested image?
Do you replicate upon upload, or is it a forward-and-cache solution?
If you can find a server that can handle the temperature at the core of Earth, and a frequency or fibre that can penetrate 6371km, I will rent it.
Cloudflare is actually really simple to setup;
For China, yes. Anywhere else, depending on use case
For websites and forums, not worth surrendering into the centralized ziggurat of CloudFlare, just host on the same continent where your audience is, and you'll be fine. So for the US audience, yes, move from Hetzner to a North American hosting. But then it doesn't matter which, East or West coast or even Canada.
Other uses, RDP should aim for sub-10ms to be pleasant to use, as for gaming, multiplayer games are built with the Internet in mind, so there are algorithms which allow to play with as much as 80-100ms of latency and not notice it.
Home servers are best if that's enough for you.
For me it does on certain aspects. I have noticed for example sshing into a Miami location feels as if I am connected to a local machine in terms of the terminal typing while pretty much any other long distance location, the delay is quite noticeable. Saving files over winscp is also faster. I guess for the average person not gaming or coding, it doesn't matter too much but otherwise it does.
You didn't see that last Godzilla/Kong movie.
Some anecdotes for perspective.
east to west
I had a client that had some internal app that would display like 200 rows of data on screen. Just hitting postgres about 10ms away.
for DR exercises we failed the DB's over to west coast. so like 70ms?
Dev's started screaming at me that their app was taking minutes to load.
Naturally I'm like the DB is fine.. it's not that far away. "let me see your code and queries"
They were doing an individual SQL query for each row.
TLDR; a Properly configured app makes a difference when latency is added.
Estonia to US West Coast
Armbian has a huge userbase in EU and Asia, but due to the opportunities in play, we moved our forums and web from a very small scale Colo, to a reputable VPS provider in us West coast. Naturally I was concerned for the speed for others, as the forums had always been sluggish from me going from US East coast to Estonia.
We had the occasional complaint, but I didn't think it was too bad. I did some mysql tuning to make sure it was tuned to the resources we have and things were prety decent.
Then we had a dev in germany having a miserable experienced. I was pretty stumped for quite awhile. I eventually setup blockbox-exporter and started measurign site response from different places.. including his house. Turned out the IPv6 gods where having a pissing match and dumping like 60% of the packets...terrible. Our provider did some routing magic to have traffic return over a different carrier and the core problem went away..
During that time tho, I did go back over and over again, tuning nginx, and realizing we weren't setting cache headers right for static assets, compressing and minifying etc. Did some more DB tuning, made sure HTTP 2.0 was enabled etc and now the site runs great and I haven't heard any comments on performance.
TLDR; know your application......and measure your site response from several locations.
I dont recommend servers in romania but maybe i'm just prejudiced.
That would be very appropriate for my Minecraft server. Do you also have Tesla coils and ELF receiving apparatus all over the planet to route the data?
I think the critical factor is always packet loss. If there's no packet being dropped between your server and the target audience, you should be fine. But even the slightest packet loss (1%) will make your system sluggish.
Depends on your location, some country still have very bad international connection.
Location matters? Yes.
But if you are behind CDN like Cloudflare then? Not really.
Cloudflare on itself can add more latency than one would get directly connecting to the server, but that also comes with its own security benefits, and honestly anything under 3 seconds of total load time is fine. There is no point in micro managing if you are already under 3 seconds.
The above comment was from the point of view of hosting, but for any other application, it depends.
From my humble experience:
For websites, it doesn't matter at all, specially with CDN and fancy caching mechanism, just optimize your pages and don't use annoying heavy JS scripts.
For large files transfer it matters a lot.
For example: When I upload from My NL servers to my FR/DE servers, speed can reach up to 80-90 MB/S. When Copying files from that same NL server to US servers, I can barely reach 30 MB/S (usually around 15-20 MB/S). On the other side, moving files between my servers in the US also reaches the full 1 gbps speed.
Ofc it depends a bit on the networks/upstreams of each DC, and some particular EU DCs might be able to do good speeds to some particular US DCs, but this is not the general case, you will have to dig deeper before picking a host of you want to rely on this.
Also another use-case where location matters, I had clients in the middle-east using RDP to connect to windows servers, US/Canada RDP is usually unusable to them, but RDP on Online/OVH servers is excellent, and on Hetzner it is very good too. Connection to UK is barely acceptable, not so good.
Also my experience. Extra second loading of website wont hurt me as much as 3-5x slower download of big file. Also after initial load assets (CSS,JS) will be cached locally, so most of the time you really don't see difference, but that ofc depends how web app is written - if most things happen on client-side then you wont notice anything.
I assume that depends. And in each particular case that should be tested before you decide. So better find the way and test everything.