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How far is too far? Question about data center locations
Premise: I have my websites on one of the biggest Italian shared hosting (you can imagine the performance...) and my visitor are all located in Italy.
I looked far and wide on this forum for the best VPS providers and now I have a solid idea of all the different options, the problem is that the offers of the Italian VPS providers (Milan datacenter) can't stand the comparison with the german ones like nexus bytes, etc. and now that Black Friday is coming can only get worse...
The questions are: Am I crippling myself with a VPS in Germany for an Italian website that receives only Italian visitors?
Is it enough to set up Cloudflare CDN to mitigate the distance problem?
Sorry if it may sound like a stupid question but I think that this is really a great community and I wanted your opinion on the matter 
Comments
Not at all. I have servers in Hetzner and OVH in Europe, but serving users in Asia (singapore, malaysia, indonesia, etc).
Get onto some looking glass of prospective providers and check what their routes are like to you. You'll be able to compare against Italy -> Italy and see which are better.
It depends on what exactly you host, but for an average website I do not think that you will see any noticeable latency by moving to a German provider.
I have some applications that need much lower latency than just loading a page, and the latency between me and Germany which is ~50ms is pretty much acceptable.
In any case, if you can afford it, rent a vps and test if the latency is within your acceptable limits.
If you go for a german provider, check if they have ti sparkle in the upstream mix.
I'm actually running a vps in italy at rhosting in milan and that one is damn fast in northern europe.
If you do want to switch from shared hosting to a vps I would rather think you should ask yourself if you do want to manage a vps with all the obligations and burdens.
did you check aruba.it ? their servers are not bad
first run some website benchmarks (see https://web.dev/vitals/) to find out what is your current bottleneck
you will know if it is a matter of extra delay (GER<->IT roundtrip) or maybe it is a matter of your current website architecture/technology
and then focus your money/effort on right direction
you could setup temp dev version of your site behind some CDN and compare results
Keep the server in Italy, if the majority comes from there.
The shorter the route to your server is, the better.
Website optimization and server quality & performance are a lot more important than the server's location.
Especially if we're talking Germany to Italy (not west coast USA to Italy).
My primitive test and measurements - with a website using Cloudflare (take it for what it is):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/19312/server-location-speed-impact/
Not necessarily true if you are talking about geographical distance.
I live in Sweden and I have better response time from some VPS's in London and Frankfurt than I have to servers in Stockholm and Helsinki. It all depends on providers, how many hops, link congestion and many other things other then geographical distance.
Sure, geographical distance may add a few milliseconds but when loading a webpage a few milliseconds is hardly noticeable. A provider with lousy peering, bad routing or a congested link on the other hand can make your website seriously slow.
Yea routing is a bitch.
There is no 100% guarantee that everyone in Italy, will have the best connection to his server, but its far more likely compared to a machine somewhere else far away.
Hence you monitor, your server and if so, you may need to switch the provider if this happens on a regular basis or change your setup.
That is true, but it depends on your definition of "far away".
Due to routing and peering, it is not at all impossible that you "travel" a shorter distance to get to a datacenter in another country than to a datacenter in the next town.
I would say the best bet is to find out which providers have good infrastructure in Italy, and then find hosting connected to those providers or atleast with good peering to them. It does not have to be located in Italy, if you can stay within a major providers backbone it really does not add many milliseconds to go across Europe.
I am not sure why price is such a problem, for more resources (granted, not double), in Milano you can get a vm at double the price of nexusbytes for example.
But, no, distance, per se, is not the problem, routing is, MIX is legendary for Italy, but OVH has it too, for example. At least had it at some point.
German providers also have good links to Italy and better european connectivity in general, but if you need Italy, Greece, North Africa, I think Milano is best.
to be honest, as long as it is reasonably close, it should be fine for a website, depending on what kind of site it is.
There will be only ~20ms added latency, which will never be noted by your users
used to have this, i find it was ok.
https://www.server.it/vps-server
Unless you are selling hot eCommerce products like Amazon or run gaming server, the location of the website hardly matters. Its not more than 1 or 2 second delay if your site is hosted in Italy or UK or US or Singapore if you apply server and browser caching.
But if you have more than 15 javascripts, 10 css, and 10 images loading per page (average like 60+ assets), then either a full page cdn like Cloudflare or static resources CDN like Bunny can be very useful to load js, css, images from nearest datacenter, like for Italy (it can load from Germany, France, UK) for South America it can load from Dallas, N. America, for India it can load from Singapore, etc with CDN. Plus caching those static assets on CDN for 1 month or an year can be more helpful.
For developed countries, yes. But I have traveled between some undeveloped country, and it some time takes over 10s to open a simple html page. However, peoples from these countries are "not important". Cruel but realistic.
You can choose a data center near Italy, such as Contabo Germany
All my websites are in Italian and my VPS is in the NL
Websites? Ignore network latency. Focus on no packet loss.
As long as your Italian visitors got no packet loss to your websites, you don't have to worry about your network performance, even if you use a VPS in Germany.
First of all, I want to thank everyone for the great discussion that sparked from my questions.
I took the time and read all your comments and will definitely go for a german VPS.
For @dusst who suggested me about Aruba I want to inform for who doesn't know, that Aruba is for Italians as GoDaddy is for Americans and this is what you get:
https://imgur.com/a/1BtT9BU
925 ms of server response time, almost a full second before CSS even starts loading...
I forgot to specify what I'm going to do on the VPS and yes, it's simple WordPress websites so the full setup would be: Ubuntu 20.04 + Openlitespeed + MariaDB + Redis + WordPress and then Litespeed cache plugin + Cloudflare.
Have a look at Prometeus in Milano. Their pricing is very reasonable and they are a really fine VPS provider.
If however you want to bet on a provider outside of Italy latency should be no problem for websites, especially from FR and DE but NL should also be OK. Your visitors will hardly notice the difference in latency.
Yes, I work for Prometeus and we do realize that our DC in Milano is not ideal for low latency across the ocean, for example, this is why we have presence in NL, but for Italy, there is no better location than Milano, not only because it is close, but because it has all the providers there and you don't jump through 10 hops and risk congestion along the way.
For example, 40 GB ssd disk, 4 GB ram, 2 TB transfer a month costs 5 GBP, which, while not at the level nextbytes charges, is still a good deal IMO and allows for plenty of local caching without the need to use a CDN.
That being said, if you get a DC peering with sparkle, in spite of the insularism the italian providers are famous for, it will likely be only 2-3 hops, no congestion 90% of the time.
I had a look at your offers and while not bad the site gives the impression of being abandoned:
How can you in good faith suggest me a VPS with you if 90% of your offers aren't available?
It is true we are mostly sold out, however look at our less known UK company (which still sells in Italy and NL): https://my.iperweb.com/products/
People don't usually go there for Prometeus products and stock is much better
EDIT: I have checked for a possible misconfiguration and the certificate is OK. What problems did you have with it?
The stocks are better but the offers are not, thank you anyway
About the SSL, if I search Prometeus hosting on google the first result is the HTTP version, you should set an HTTPS redirect to avoid the problem
IMO, that is not really an issue, the client area is full HTTPS, no secrets on the main page and it may load faster in certain cases. We will consider it, though.
Also, "Latest news" is from 2018.
If you have nothing newer than that, it actually looks better if you just remove that section. No news looks better than old news, imho.
Cheaper not always better. Even in IT / LET.
This understanding comes from experience.
Sometimes better to stick to 15usd/mo vps with 1GB ram, instead of paying 15usd/year for bullshit crap VPS with unixbench around 300, and problems here and there with the system...
You're lucky, you have in Italy one of the most reputable provider over let for many many years, but since 2017 they dissapear here on let.
The providers are: prometeus/iwstack/iperweb.
I've used them for many years. This is one of the most rock solid in terms of stability and performance provider over LET in 2012-2015,2016 years for sure.
Extra 2-5ms delay not an issue for me for EU users, when the servers works fine for years.
But I've been like you, and start to jump over different offers around LET, and the only thing that i face in annually plans - a pain. Massive butthurt.
And to that end, our London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt servers indeed benefit from direct connection to TI Sparkle, so anyone of our Customers would be likely to help
.