If the target audience is in the USA, Europe, and Asia, how should the VPS location be selected?

I'm a little confused about choosing the best VPS location for a website.

If most of the visitors are from the USA, Europe, and Asia, is it better to choose a VPS location near to the majority of users? Or do things like the quality of the network and performance of the server actually matter more than physical distance?

Would love to hear recommendations if you have experience with different VPS locations.
Which place/provider worked bet for you

Yes, you should always host your website closer to your target audience.

Network quality matters, but there is still a limit to how fast data moves over long distances.

So, a server in the EU will be slow for Asian people no matter what.

Also, it depends on the network route.

In general, if you get most of the traffic from Asia, get a server in Singapore. If most of your traffic comes from the US, choose the US, and if it comes from the EU, choose the EU. If your traffic is like half EU and half US, you can go with a server in Amsterdam or around New York. If your traffic is coming from China/Japan, you could technically get a server in Los Angeles as well, but it can still cause issues due to the distance.

In case you have a very international, multi-continential audience.

One safe way to resolve this is to use a solid CDN network.
This is especially important for any type of a site serving streaming or high data volume content, that wants to be accessible to audiences on multiple continents without a lag.

If you're starting out - look for a pay as you grow plan, with fixed over-usage costs.

If you happen to move volume in terms of data transfer, a solid CDN provider may offer you to pre-pay monthly for your usual data transfer volume and save.

Ideally with a free setup and migration assistance.

Also, keep in mind that there are much more cost effective solutions, as opposed to using something like Cloudfront to speed up Amazon S3.
In fact, you can save 80 % or more with the right alternative,.

cloudhub said:

I'm a little confused about choosing the best VPS location for a website.

If most of the visitors are from the USA, Europe, and Asia, is it better to choose a VPS location near to the majority of users? Or do things like the quality of the network and performance of the server actually matter more than physical distance?

Would love to hear recommendations if you have experience with different VPS locations.
Which place/provider worked bet for you

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I would choose which one might have more customers and go there. I wouldn't stress though, there is millions of sites in other countries that rank all over. The location helps more if you have a location targeted business, otherwise it's a small difference. I'm in the US so I always host here, most connections go around the world in a split second so unless it's local targeted, it's fine where I am.

chaze said:

I would choose which one might have more customers and go there. I wouldn't stress though, there is millions of sites in other countries that rank all over. The location helps more if you have a location targeted business, otherwise it's a small difference. I'm in the US so I always host here, most connections go around the world in a split second so unless it's local targeted, it's fine where I am.

Click to expand...

That's a good point. I was probably overthinking the location part a bit. For a general website targeting multiple regions, it sounds like network quality and server performance should be the bigger priorities. Dou usually stick with the same us location provider, or have you tested european or asian locations as well?

Select EU, but the network should be very good and the uplink, as the with EU hosted physical server, it can act fine for both USA and the Asia, and very good for the EU, though nowadays a good network can be fine anywhere in the world, but surely it makes a difference though a very little, where the physical server is located as compared to the most of the visitors, for the site loading speed.

if the traffic is spread across three regions i'd choose a central location and put cloudflare or another CDN in front of the site.

I would pick a reliable server near the biggest share of users and put a CDN in front. Network quality matters more than chasing the perfect VPS location for every region.