Infrastructure
Your files sit in 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
The origin, and we name it
Free
A CDN, switched on whenever you ask
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
The files live in one London facility, on the 20i platform. Not a plural sweep of 'global locations' — a single building, and you deserve to know which.
Distance is physics, not marketing
In fibre, light manages roughly 200 km a millisecond, and no real route runs straight. Nobody in this industry can shorten the trip from London to Sydney.
The levers we can actually pull
NVMe drives, LiteSpeed caching, and an edge network standing ahead of the origin. Weighed against raw distance, those matter far more to most visitors.
Decide on the facts first
If nearly all your visitors sit in Australia or East Asia, a host with a nearby origin probably suits you better. We would rather say so out loud than take the money.
Real Distances
Round-trip figures from where you happen to be
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 | No perceptible wait at all. For readers in Britain or Ireland this is as close as hosting gets. |
| Western & Northern Europe | 10–35 ms | Indistinguishable from local. Moving the hardware inside your own borders would buy you nothing. |
| Eastern Europe & Turkey | 30–60 ms | Brisk for readers, and the panel still answers at a working pace. |
| US East Coast & Eastern Canada | 70–90 ms | Developers may notice the hop. Cached pages land before anyone counts. |
| West & North Africa | 90–160 ms | Where you land in that range is your own carrier's doing far more than the mileage. |
| US West Coast | 130–150 ms | Put a CDN in front and readers notice nothing. Anything uncached in the panel starts to feel long. |
| Middle East | 110–140 ms | Content arrives at a good clip. Long stretches in the control panel lose it. |
| South Asia | 120–200 ms | Taken from Pakistan, the TCP connect sits near 200 ms. Cached pages hold their pace, while the panel counts every mile of it. |
| Southeast & East Asia | 160–230 ms | Serving this region properly means a CDN first, because the origin on its own will lag behind. |
| Australia & New Zealand | 250–290 ms | About as far from London as the map allows, and worth deciding with that in front of you. |
| South America | 180–210 ms | Cache keeps the pages brisk. Anything that must reach London arrives slowly. |
Latency measures one request's round trip. A page fires dozens of them, which is precisely why caching and a CDN matter more than the raw figure.
About the CDN
What it speeds up, and what it cannot
An edge network is genuinely useful and habitually oversold. Both columns below hold true.
It does fix
- Images, stylesheets, scripts and fonts, served from whichever edge node sits nearest the reader
- Cached HTML, which is nearly every page somebody browsing signed out will open
- Sudden bursts of traffic, since a cached answer never troubles the origin at all
It doesn't fix
- The WordPress admin, which is signed-in traffic and therefore never cached
- Baskets and account pages, uncacheable for that same signed-in reason
- Database lookups, and any dynamic request the cache misses, all of which travel the whole way to London
- File manager, SSH and FTP sessions, which talk to the origin directly every time
By Country
How all of this reads from your own country
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?
One London facility, running on the 20i platform this business is built on. Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce and mail plans all run from there. It gets said plainly because 'global infrastructure' almost always means a single building the provider would sooner not identify — and that is a fact for before the payment, not after.
Does where the server sits shift anything in SEO?
Much less than it once did, and much less than the industry keeps implying. Google crawls from many places and marks the speed genuine visitors experience, not the distance drawn on a map to your machine. Real page speed and Core Web Vitals are the measures that count, and caching with an edge network attacks both head on. Location does not decide which country you rank in either; content, name and inbound links do. A .de name written in German ranks in Germany whether the files sit in Frankfurt or London.
My audience is far from London. Will it crawl?
For most of them it will not, though the honest answer comes in two halves. A signed-out reader on a cached page is served by an edge node beside them, and London hardly features. Logged-in work is another matter: the WordPress admin, the checkout and anything dynamic that cannot be cached takes the round trip to London every time. Editing from Sydney costs you something like a quarter of a second on every action. Your visitors ride the quick lane; you, at the admin screen, absorb the distance.
What does a CDN actually speed up?
Static assets and cached HTML: images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, and every page a signed-out visitor opens. All of that leaves an edge node nearby, which is the bulk of most traffic. What it cannot touch is anything uncacheable: the WordPress admin, the checkout, account pages, database queries, SSH and FTP sessions. Those reach the London origin every single time. A provider telling you an edge network makes location irrelevant has overshot the facts.
Can I choose a different location?
Not today. There is one London origin, and stating that flatly beats dangling a choice that was never there. Where a project genuinely wants a nearby origin, you will get that answer rather than a poor fit and an invoice. For most sites, a CDN in front of London is the wiser spend.
How do I measure the speed myself before buying?
Aim any independent speed test at a live page here from where you sit, then repeat it from your audience's region; plenty of free tools let you choose the firing point. That gives you a measurement rather than our word for it. Hosting also carries 30 days of money-back cover, so the real site can go on and be measured properly. If the figures do not work for your audience, take the refund.
Put our speed on the clock yourself.
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.
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