onionvps

Performance & reliability

How much latency should I expect from a VPS?

Short answer

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. Light in fibre travels at roughly two-thirds of c and real paths are about 1.35 times the great-circle distance, so about 1 ms per 100 km each way is the floor.

That floor is physics and no provider beats it. What a good network does is get you close to it — direct peering rather than three transit hops, and no congested links adding jitter on top of distance.

Every location page here publishes an estimated round trip to every other location, computed from great-circle distance with the routing factor applied. The method is published so the numbers are reproducible rather than promotional.

Typical round-trip times
RouteApproximate RTT
Same city<2 ms
Amsterdam ↔ Frankfurt~8 ms
London ↔ New York~72 ms
Frankfurt ↔ Singapore~160 ms
Los Angeles ↔ Tokyo~105 ms
Miami ↔ São Paulo~115 ms
London ↔ Sydney~275 ms

See also: Peering · Jitter

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