Selecting a Location

Servers for Friends and Family

In general, servers for Friends and Family don't require you to take into consideration location hardware. In contrast, it requires you to choose a node that is closest to your Friends and Family. If your Friends are based in the US for example a good server with optimal performance would be a node from either NYC or MIA. However, in some cases, your Friends and Family may not all be located in the same vicinity. In this case, the best server would be one that is in the "middle" for each party. If half of your Friends are based in the US, specifically Texas, for example, and the other half is based in London, a prime location would be NYC as NYC is in between these two locations.

Servers for Commercial Use

Unlike the previous scenario servers for commercial use rely on numerous conditions. In selecting a location for your server, depending on your Software, choosing a location with complementary Software would prove to be optimal. In addition, choosing a location that is in a "central zone" will also prove to be optimal. Let's take for example you want to create a Pocketmine-MP server. Since we know PocketMine-MP takes a lot of CPU compared to RAM (learn more about which software in our other article), we would choose a location that has a good CPU which could be in our case NYC or SIN. Both locations are in "central zones" so it is up to you to choose which location is best for you. If you think your server will appeal to most Europeans (primary English speaking countries), NYC would be a better option, vice versa.

Using Command Prompt to see Server Proximity

One resource which everyone has access to is Command Prompt. To see how close the node is to your location and see how much ping/latency you are expected to get: use the ping feature for help. Below is an example for seeing how good the NYC node would be. First open up command prompt and type in this command.

C:\Users\twiqk\> ping nyc01.witherhosting.com

The above would output the following:

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 47ms, Maximum = 48ms, Average = 47ms

As you can see from my location I would be expected to be getting around 47 ms worth of ping. Or, in other words, it takes 47 ms for data to be transferred between me and the server location.