Networking4 min read
Choosing where your server lives
Latency is distance divided by the speed of light, and no plan changes that. How to pick a region for the players you actually have.
Server location is the one specification that cannot be upgraded later without moving everything. It is also the one most people pick last, usually by accident.
The number is physics, not hardware
Light in fibre covers roughly 200 km per millisecond, and a packet has to go both ways. Tbilisi to Frankfurt and back is about 40 ms before any equipment touches it. No amount of CPU makes that smaller, and any host claiming otherwise is describing a different measurement.
- Under 30 ms - indistinguishable from local for almost every game.
- 30-60 ms - fine for survival, building and roleplay. Noticeable in a shooter if you look for it.
- 60-100 ms - playable, and the point where competitive players start complaining.
- Over 120 ms - a different experience, not a worse version of the same one.
Pick for the middle of your group, not the edge
A server placed to give one person 10 ms and everyone else 90 is worse than one giving everybody 45. Find where most of your players are and put it there; the outliers were going to have a worse time wherever it went.
Our machines are in Germany, which is the sensible middle for Georgian, Turkish, Eastern European and most Western European players at once. It is a deliberate choice rather than a coincidence of what was cheap.