1. Check the Locations Page
Open the locations page. The Your Latency card measures each data centre from your browser within a second or two, and marks the fastest. The order pages show the same numbers next to each location.
2. Measure from Where Your Users Are
Your own number only tells you about your own connection. If your users are elsewhere, ask someone there, a colleague or a customer, to open the same page and send you what it shows. A server you already run near your users works too: open the page in a browser on it, or compare its ping to your current host.
To see where along a route any delay or packet loss comes from, use mtr against a server you already have:
sudo apt install -y mtr-tiny # macOS: brew install mtr mtr -rwc 50 203.0.113.10 # your server's address
Loss at one hop that does not carry on to the final line is usually a router that does not bother answering pings, not a real problem. Loss that continues to the end is.
3. Read the Numbers
| Round trip | What it feels like |
|---|---|
| Under 30 ms | Instant for websites, remote desktops and most games |
| 30–80 ms | Fine for websites and apps; noticeable in fast games |
| 80–150 ms | Usable; remote desktops and voice start to feel laggy |
| Over 150 ms | Noticeable everywhere interactive |
Light in fibre covers about 200 km per millisecond, and routes are rarely straight, so a few thousand kilometres adds tens of milliseconds whatever the provider.
4. Rules of Thumb
- Users on the US East Coast or in Europe: Ashburn, the shorter path to both.
- Users across the central and southern US, or in Mexico: Dallas.
- Users everywhere: the location matters less than a CDN in front of the site, which serves static files from near each visitor.
- Trading: close to your broker's trade server, not to you. See How to keep MetaTrader running on a Windows VPS.