Infrastructure
Where your names and sites live: London
Most providers stamp 'global' on the infrastructure and leave you guessing. Ours is one datacentre. Here is what that honestly means, wherever your visitors sit.
London
The city holding your files
NVMe
Storage fitted to every plan
1
Where the origin sits, named
Free
CDN available, on request, any time
The Trade-Off
One origin, no hedging
A straight answer helps you decide. A vague one only ever helps the host.
One location, stated plainly
Your files sit in one London facility, on the 20i platform. No plural wave of 'global locations' here. It is a single building, and you have a right to know which one.
Distance is physics, not marketing
Down a fibre, light covers roughly 200 km a millisecond, and no working route ever goes in a straight line. Nobody selling hosting can make London to Sydney any shorter than it is.
The levers we can actually pull
NVMe drives. LiteSpeed caching. An edge network sitting out in front of the origin. Set those against bare distance and, for most visitors, they carry far more weight.
Decide on the facts first
Suppose almost every visitor you get is in Australia or East Asia. A host with an origin closer to them will probably serve you better, and we would sooner tell you that than quietly bank your money.
Real Distances
Round-trip numbers, measured from wherever you happen to sit
Indicative figures taken on a decent consumer line — an honest expectation rather than a promise to shelter behind.
| Where you are | Round trip | How that feels |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom & Ireland | 5–15 ms | Nothing you could call a wait. Readers sitting in Britain or Ireland will not find hosting that lands nearer than this. |
| Western & Northern Europe | 10–35 ms | It reads as local. Shifting the hardware inside your own borders would gain you nothing worth measuring. |
| Eastern Europe & Turkey | 30–60 ms | Quick enough for readers, and the panel still responds at a workable speed. |
| US East Coast & Eastern Canada | 70–90 ms | A developer might feel the hop. Cached pages arrive before anyone starts counting. |
| West & North Africa | 90–160 ms | Which end of that range you land on comes down to your carrier far more than to distance. |
| US West Coast | 130–150 ms | Stick a CDN in front and readers notice nothing at all. Anything uncached in the panel, though, starts to feel like waiting. |
| Middle East | 110–140 ms | Content still turns up smartly. Spend a long stretch in the control panel and you lose that. |
| South Asia | 120–200 ms | Measured from Pakistan, a TCP connect lands somewhere around 200 ms. Cached pages keep their speed; the control panel, meanwhile, feels every mile of the journey. |
| Southeast & East Asia | 160–230 ms | To serve this region well you put a CDN in first, since the origin by itself will trail. |
| Australia & New Zealand | 250–290 ms | This is roughly the furthest point from London the map offers, so make the decision with that fact in view. |
| South America | 180–210 ms | Cached pages stay quick. Whatever has to travel to London takes its time. |
What latency records is the round trip of a single request. Load one page and dozens go out, which is exactly why caching and a CDN count for more than the bare number.
About the CDN
Which parts a CDN accelerates, and which it cannot
An edge network is genuinely useful and habitually oversold. Both columns below hold true.
It does fix
- Images, stylesheets, scripts and fonts, delivered by whichever edge node happens to sit closest to the reader
- Cached HTML, covering almost every page a signed-out visitor is ever going to open
- Abrupt surges in traffic, because a cached response never has to bother the origin server
It doesn't fix
- The WordPress admin, since signed-in traffic never gets cached at any point
- Account pages and the basket, uncacheable for that same signed-in reason
- Database lookups, plus any dynamic request the cache happens to miss, every one of them travelling all the way to London
- Sessions in the file manager, over SSH and over FTP, each one talking straight to the origin
By Country
How this plays out from where you live
Latency out of London, the endings we register locally, the currency prices appear in, and the tax position — one territory at a time.
Common Questions
Questions about our location
Where does my site actually sit?
A single London facility, sitting on the 20i platform that the whole business runs on. Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce and mail plans are all served from it. We say so in plain words because 'global infrastructure' nearly always turns out to be one building the provider would rather not name, and that is something you should know before you pay, not afterwards.
Does server location change anything for my SEO rankings?
Far less than it used to, and far less than the industry likes to imply. Google crawls from all sorts of places, and what it records is the speed a real visitor gets, not the distance on a map between a crawler and your machine. Actual page speed and Core Web Vitals are what gets weighed, and caching plus an edge network go straight at both. Nor does hardware location dictate the country you rank in. Content, name and inbound links do that. A .de name written in German will rank in Germany whether its files sit in Frankfurt or London.
My readers are nowhere near London. Will pages drag?
For most of them, no, but the honest answer splits in two. A signed-out reader hitting a cached page gets it from an edge node close by, and London barely enters the picture. Logged-in work behaves differently. The WordPress admin, the checkout, anything dynamic that will not cache: all of it makes the full round trip to London on every request. Edit your site from Sydney and each action costs you roughly a quarter of a second. So your visitors take the fast lane while you, sitting at the admin screen, are the one paying for the distance.
What does a CDN actually speed up?
Cached HTML and static assets: pictures, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, plus every page a signed-out visitor requests. Those all come off an edge node near the reader, and they account for most traffic on most sites. Where it has no reach is anything uncacheable. The WordPress admin, the checkout, account pages, database queries, SSH and FTP sessions all travel back to the London origin, every single time. Any provider claiming an edge network makes location irrelevant has gone past what the facts support.
Can I choose a different location?
Not at present. There is a single London origin, and saying so bluntly is better than waving a choice around that never existed. If a project really does need an origin nearer its readers, we will tell you that instead of selling you a bad fit and posting an invoice. For most sites, putting a CDN in front of London is money better spent.
How can I check the speed for myself before paying?
Point any independent speed test at a live page on this site from wherever you happen to be, then run it again from the region your readers live in; a good number of free tools let you pick the firing point. What you end up with is a measurement, not our claim. Hosting carries 30 days of money-back cover as well, so you can put the real site up and time it in earnest. Numbers not good enough for your audience? Take the refund.
Time us against your own stopwatch.
Thirty days to put real speed in front of your real audience. If the figures fall short, take the refund — we will not argue the point.
Browse Hosting Plans