I recently tried to move my Linode to Fremont, CA from Atlanta (where it is now). Turns out, latency matters. A lot.
The top cities that access my site (in order) are:
- New York
- London
- Bangalore
- San Francisco
- Chicago
- Sydney
- Toronto
- Los Angeles
- Seattle
Notice that the top three are all coming from the East. So when I moved my site to the west coast I saw load times go up by around 100-200ms from most locations around the world.
So I canceled the migration and am once again hosting out of Atlanta. Hosting from the east coast does have its advantages.
The speed of light: Don’t mess with it.
