Importance of Server Location for Web Hosting

Originally Posted by josephf1

How was it different, from a technical perspective, 5-20 years ago?

Ping times and max throughput have improved a great deal, as have client ISP connections. All these positive improvements make the network connection differences between geographical locations a lot easier to deal with today than in the past.

Let’s say the minimum connect and transfer from one location to another was 20 seconds back in the day (for a set hypothetical data transfer), and hosting this from a server halfway around the world would triple the time needed. That would be a very noticeable difference. Now let’s say this same transaction today takes only half a second to complete, even if you triple that result things are…