Does hosting in Turkey reduce latency?

The closer a server is to the visitor, the lower the latency (ping) tends to be. The reason is that the speed of light in fiber sets a floor: roughly 5 ms one way for every 1,000 km, or 10 ms round trip. If your visitors are in Turkey, a server in Istanbul keeps that distance penalty small. If they are abroad, latency will be higher.

The figures in this article are theoretical minimums that come from physics, not measurements. You can measure the real values from your own connection with the commands below.

What is latency, and how does it differ from bandwidth?

Latency is the time a packet needs to travel to the server and back, and it is measured as round-trip time (RTT). Bandwidth is how much data flows per second. Think of a pipe: latency is its length and bandwidth is its width. When you download a big file, the width matters most. When you send many small requests, the length does.

How much does distance add?

Light travels through fiber at about 200,000 km per second, which is roughly 200 km per millisecond. Real cable routes are longer than a straight line, and every router adds a little time. Real values therefore come out higher than the table below.

What does latency affect?

• Web pages. On a new HTTPS connection, the first byte arrives after about 3 round trips: 1 for TCP, 1 for TLS 1.3 and 1 for the request and response. With TLS 1.2 it is 4. The server's processing time comes on top. If the connection is reused, only 1 round trip remains. When a page makes dozens of requests, the delay adds up.
• Games. Ping is the time for each move to reach the server and come back. The closer the players are to the server, the smoother the experience.
• SSH. Every character you type travels to the server and back to your screen. With high latency you feel a slight lag as you type.
• Downloads and uploads. Bandwidth decides here, and latency comes second.

Who benefits from a server in Turkey?

If most of your visitors or team are in Turkey, a server in Istanbul keeps the delay that distance adds to a minimum. Seturack has a single location, and it is Istanbul. A shorter distance tends to lower latency, but the network path depends as much on how providers connect to each other as on distance. So trust your own measurements rather than any claim.

If your audience is abroad

If your audience lives in another country, latency rises as the table shows. That isn't always a problem. For an admin panel, a blog or file sharing, some extra latency often goes unnoticed. In games and real-time applications it matters a lot. At Seturack the server is in Istanbul, but orders can be placed from anywhere in the world. Serving an audience abroad is possible. Just plan with the knowledge that latency will rise as the table shows. Here is what you can do:

• Use a content delivery network (CDN) that caches images, scripts and style sheets and serves them from a point close to the user. Dynamic pages still come from your server.
• Turn on HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 and compression on the server, so many requests share one connection.
• Cut down the number of requests per page and the size of images.
• If most of your users are concentrated in one region, take that region into account when you choose where the server sits.

Measure it yourself

Measure latency from your own connection to your server's IP address:

ping -c 10 SERVER_IP

On Windows, use -n instead of -c. The average value in the output is the round-trip time. Don't look only at the average: if the gap between the min, max and mdev (stddev on macOS) values is large, the latency is unstable (jitter). Packet loss also ruins games and voice applications. Repeat the measurement at different times of day, because values can change at busy hours. To see where along the path things slow down and where packets are lost, run:

mtr -rwc 20 SERVER_IP

On macOS, mtr has to be installed separately. To break down where the time goes on a website, use:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "dns:%{time_namelookup} connect:%{time_connect} tls:%{time_appconnect} firstbyte:%{time_starttransfer} total:%{time_total}\n" https://example.com

The values are cumulative, in seconds from the start of the request. The gap between firstbyte and tls is one round trip plus the time the server spends preparing the page. If that gap is large, the problem isn't distance but the application or the database.

Is the slowness really latency?

Not every slowdown comes from distance. Part of the delay comes from the user's own network (Wi-Fi, mobile data). Based on your measurements, you can separate the causes like this:

For problems on the server side, check memory and processor use as well. If needed, you can scale the server up from the panel.

If you want your server in Istanbul, you can work out your price on the pricing page.