This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Meghna Meghwani
Latency plays a major role in how quickly a website loads. Have you ever clicked on a website and waited… and waited… and waited for it to appear? Frustrating, right? While many things can cause a slow-loading website, one of the biggest, and most overlooked, reasons is server location.
Imagine ordering food from your neighborhood restaurant versus one across the country. Which one will arrive faster? The same reasoning applies to the data on your website. It takes longer the farther away the server is from the visitor.
In this blog, we’ll go over all you need to know about how the location of a server affects latency. No complicated tech terms, just real, human-friendly information.
What does latency mean?
Latency is the amount of time it takes for data to go from a server to your device and back. Generally, it is measured in ms (milliseconds). The reaction time gets faster as the latency goes down.
Let’s say you click on a website. That click sends a request to a server. The server responds by sending data back to your browser. The round-trip time is your latency.
What Is Server Location?
Server location refers to the physical place where your web server is hosted. It could be in Mumbai, New York, London, or anywhere else in the world.
Just like you wouldn’t want your pizza to come from another country, you don’t want your server to be too far from your users.
How Server Location Impacts Latency
The farther away the server is from the user, the longer it takes for data to travel. This increases latency.
For example:
- A person in India who connects to a server in the U.S. might have a latency of 250ms.
- The same user could have a latency of only 30 ms when connecting to a server in Mumbai.
That is major difference in how fast loads website!
Latency as a Delivery Route in Real Life
Think about writing someone a letter:
- Nearby location: The letter gets there the next day if it’s close by.
- Across the globe: It could take a week.
The same goes with latency. It takes time for information to get to you, as if route is longer. Your server is like the post office, and your website is like that letter.
To understand how server location impacts latency, let me show you a quick comparison between two of the most visited websites in the world, Google and Facebook.
By testing the latency to both websites, you can observe noticeable differences in response times. These differences are often influenced by the geographical location of their nearest data centers, network routing, and overall server infrastructure.
This simple comparison helps highlight how physical distance and server optimization can affect the speed at which websites respond to user requests.
As you can see in the above attached screenshot, the traceroute results show that Google’s servers responded slightly faster than Facebook’s, with lower latency and fewer hops overall. This indicates that Google’s network path is more optimized or geographically closer in this case.
Read full article: https://serveravatar.com/server-location-latency/
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Meghna Meghwani