Performance & reliability
Does server location affect SEO?
Indirectly and measurably. Search engines do not rank by server country, but they do measure page speed, and distance is latency. A server 200 ms from your users costs real Core Web Vitals score. Use a CDN if your audience is global; place the origin near your audience if it is regional.
For local search intent, ccTLD and hreflang signals matter far more than where the hardware sits. A .fr domain served from Panama ranks in France; a .com served from Paris does not automatically rank better there.
The measurable mechanism is Time to First Byte, which feeds directly into Core Web Vitals and therefore into ranking. That is a latency problem, and a CDN in front of the origin solves it regardless of where the origin lives — which is what makes offshore hosting and good SEO entirely compatible.
See also: Offshore hosting · TTFB
7 answers in Performance & reliability
- What is CPU steal time and why does it matter? Steal time is the percentage of time your virtual CPU was ready to run but the hypervisor gave the physical core to someone else. It appears as the "s…
- Why is my VPS slow? In order of likelihood: memory exhaustion causing swap thrashing, disk IO saturation, CPU steal time on shared cores, an unoptimised database, or netw…
- How much latency should I expect from a VPS? Within a metro, under 5 ms. Within a continent, 10–40 ms. Across the Atlantic, 70–90 ms. Europe to Asia, 150–200 ms. Antipodal routes, 250–320 ms. Lig…
- How many visitors can a VPS handle? A well-configured 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance serves a static site to millions of monthly visits, a cached WordPress site to roughly 300,000, and an uncach…
- How do I benchmark a VPS? Measure the three things that actually vary: single-thread CPU with sysbench, disk with fio at 4K random read/write, and network with iperf3 to a know…
- How much faster is NVMe than SATA SSD? Roughly five times the random IOPS — about 500,000 versus 90,000 — and around five times lower latency, under 0.1 ms versus about 0.5 ms. Sequential t…