Hosting location affects load time because every request has to travel from the visitor to the server and back, and a page load involves several of those round trips before the first byte arrives. The further the server, the longer each trip. Distance matters most for the first, uncached request and for dynamic pages; a content delivery network, caching and modern protocols reduce its effect. This guide explains the mechanics and how to test the difference for your own visitors.<\/p>\n
Data travels through optical fibre at roughly two-thirds of the speed of light in a vacuum, about 200,000 kilometres per second. That works out to roughly one millisecond of round-trip time for every 100 kilometres of cable between visitor and server. Real routes are longer than the straight-line distance, because cables follow coastlines and pass through exchange points, and each router along the way adds a little more. The result is called latency, usually measured as round-trip time (RTT).<\/p>\n
Latency is different from bandwidth. A fast connection moves more data per second, but it cannot make each round trip shorter. For web pages, which involve many small exchanges, latency often matters more than bandwidth.<\/p>\n
Before a browser receives the first byte of a page from a server it has not contacted recently, several exchanges happen:<\/p>\n
So a distant server multiplies its latency three or four times before anything appears, and more again for each additional resource loaded from that server on a new connection. HTTP\/3, which runs over QUIC, combines the transport and encryption handshakes into a single round trip, which reduces the penalty of distance.<\/p>\n
A CDN keeps copies of static files, and sometimes whole pages, in data centres around the world. Visitors connect to the nearest one, so the handshakes and cached content come from nearby. Only uncached requests go back to the origin server. Cloudflare has a data centre in Harare, so visitors in Zimbabwe can be served cached content locally even when the origin server is in Europe. Tremhost sets up and monitors Cloudflare<\/a> through its Armor services, and includes Cloudflare Pro on The Big Mike hosting plan and every managed WordPress site.<\/p>\n A page cache stores finished HTML so the server responds without running PHP or querying the database. It does not shorten the round trip, but it removes processing time from each one.<\/p>\n HTTP\/2 and HTTP\/3 send many files over one connection, so the handshake cost is paid once rather than for every file. Loading fewer third-party domains also cuts extra handshakes.<\/p>\n Every script, font and image from another server adds requests. Trimming them helps visitors everywhere, but especially those far from your servers.<\/p>\n For a brochure site behind a CDN, most visitors receive cached content from nearby, and the origin location matters less.<\/p>\nPage caching<\/h3>\n
Connection reuse and modern protocols<\/h3>\n
Fewer, smaller resources<\/h3>\n
When server location matters most<\/h2>\n
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Choosing a location<\/h2>\n
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