How much latency does distance add?

Light in fibre covers about 200 km per millisecond, and routes are never straight, so a useful rule is roughly 1 ms of round-trip time per 100 km. Germany to Finland is about 20–25 ms; Europe to the US east coast 80–100 ms; Europe to East Asia 200–250 ms.

Does server location matter for a website?

Less than you think if you use a CDN for static files — the CDN serves them near the visitor. It still matters for the first HTML response, API calls and anything dynamic, so put the server near the majority of your users.

What matters for a trading bot?

The distance to the exchange's API servers, not to you. Measure the round trip from a server to the exact API endpoint your bot calls; a few milliseconds matter for arbitrage, almost nothing for a bot that trades a few times a day.

Where are EQVPS servers located?

Germany and Finland, and you pick the location when you order. That's a good fit for users and services in Europe, the Middle East and the European exchanges and APIs. If most of your users are in Asia or the Americas, a European server will add 80–250 ms and we're honestly not the right choice.

How do I test latency before ordering?

Ping or mtr a known server in the same city from where your users are, and check where the API you depend on is hosted with a traceroute. After ordering, measure from the VPS itself with curl timing — it shows DNS, connect, TLS and total time separately.

How to choose a VPS location for low latency

People spend hours comparing vCPU counts and then put the server on the wrong continent. For anything interactive — a shell, an API, a game, a bot talking to an exchange — the location often matters more than the hardware. The good news: latency is mostly physics, so you can predict it and measure it before you pay.

The physics in one line

Light in optical fibre travels about 200 km per millisecond. Cables don't run in straight lines and every router adds a little, so a solid rule of thumb is about 1 ms of round-trip time per 100 km of real-world distance.

Route	Typical round trip
Within one city	1–3 ms
Frankfurt ↔ Helsinki	20–25 ms
Central Europe ↔ London	10–20 ms
Europe ↔ US East Coast	80–100 ms
Europe ↔ US West Coast	140–170 ms
Europe ↔ Singapore / Tokyo	160–250 ms

No amount of CPU fixes a 200 ms round trip. If your users are in Tokyo, a server in Germany will feel slow no matter how fast it is.

What "close" means depends on the job

A website or API. Close to the majority of your users. A CDN hides distance for static files, but the first HTML response, logins, API calls and anything dynamic still travel to the origin.

A trading bot. Close to the exchange's API servers — not to you. Where you sit is irrelevant; the bot talks to the exchange hundreds of times a day. For arbitrage every few milliseconds count; for a bot that places a handful of orders a day, 30 ms makes no difference. More in low-latency VPS for trading bots.

An AI agent calling model APIs. Location barely matters. A model takes seconds to answer; 30 ms of network is noise. Pick on price and privacy.

A game server. Close to the players. Anything under ~60 ms feels fine for most games; competitive shooters want far less.

Remote desktop and SSH. Close to you. Typing over 150 ms of latency is miserable.

Measure it yourself

From your own machine, or from a server near your users, check the path to a candidate location:

mtr -rwc 50 example.com

mtr shows every hop with loss and latency — far more useful than a single ping, because it reveals where the delay is added.

From a VPS, measure the service you actually depend on, broken down by phase:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w 'dns %{time_namelookup}s  connect %{time_connect}s  tls %{time_appconnect}s  total %{time_total}s\n' \
  https://api.example.com/health

connect is roughly one network round trip, tls adds the handshake, and total includes the server's own processing time. If connect is 2 ms and total is 900 ms, distance isn't your problem.

Where EQVPS fits

Our servers are in Germany and Finland, and you choose the location per order. That covers users across Europe well, the Middle East reasonably, and European exchanges and API endpoints very well. Finland is a few milliseconds further from Western Europe and a little closer to the Nordics and the Baltics; for most workloads either works.

Honestly: we don't have locations in Asia or the Americas. If that's where your users are, a server in Europe adds 80–250 ms to every round trip, and you should host closer to them.

The short version

Decide what the server talks to most — users, an exchange, an API, you.
Put it near that, using ~1 ms per 100 km as your estimate.
Measure with mtr and curl -w instead of trusting a map.
Don't pay for a faster CPU to fix a distance problem.

If you're choosing between a NAT and a dedicated-IP plan for the same box, that's a separate question — here's the one-question test.