Regions & Latency: Why Location Matters
Even light has a speed limit
Even light has a speed limit
Your server is in US-East (New York). Click any city on the map to see the round-trip latency. Distance determines the minimum possible delay. No technology can beat the speed of light.
Where you deploy your server determines who gets fast response times. Click each region to see latency from that location to users worldwide.
Latency affects everything users experience.
100ms extra latency = 1% drop in revenue (Amazon). Users perceive delays above 200ms. Above 1000ms they think the site is broken.
Competitive gamers need under 30ms ping. At 100ms, actions feel delayed. At 200ms, fast games are unplayable. This is why game servers exist per-region.
Above 150ms, conversations start to feel laggy. Above 300ms, people talk over each other. This is why Zoom has data centers on every continent.
High-frequency trading firms pay millions for fiber routes that are 1ms faster between New York and Chicago. One firm drilled a straight tunnel through the Allegheny Mountains to shave 3ms off the route. At trading speeds, 3ms is an eternity.
You've learned why server location affects speed, how data centers are distributed globally, and why CDNs exist. The speed of light is fast, but across oceans it adds up. Location matters.
Light in fiber travels at about 200,000 km/s. New York to London (5,500 km) takes 28ms minimum. You cannot beat physics, only work around it.
Cloud providers have data centers in regions worldwide: US-East, EU-West, Asia-Pacific. You choose where to deploy based on where your users are.
A server 1,000 km away responds in ~10ms. One 10,000 km away takes ~100ms. For real-time apps like games, this difference is everything.
Content Delivery Networks cache your static files in dozens of cities worldwide. A user in Tokyo gets files from Tokyo, not your origin in New York.
Put your new knowledge into practice!