Website Performance: Choose Data Center Carefully

Data center which hosts servers for a website plays a significant role in the performance of the website. There are few things which should be kept in mind before choosing a data center:

1) Measuring distance in terms of hops is not the best approach. Latency is the accurate measure of speed on the internet and should be considered over the physical distance (hops). Thus, a data center closest to your customer might not be the fastest. Check latency of multiple data centers before choosing one. Latency can be tested by simply performing ping/traceroute tests to any server already hosted on the data center.

2) Check latency from regions which represent majority of the website's audience locations. So, if your site will cater to a specific region (like a city or state) then measure latency from only that region. If your site caters to a distributed audience (throughout the country or across continents) then test the latency from regions where you expect the maximum traffic.

3) Choose a ISP neutral data center. Data centers run by an ISP will perform really well with clients using the same ISP but might not be great when connecting with other ISPs.