Infrastructure
Your files sit in London
Most hosts call their infrastructure 'global' and leave you to guess. Ours is one datacentre. Here is what that honestly means, depending on where your visitors are.
London
Where the files sit
NVMe
Drives on every plan
1
Origin, and we name it
Free
CDN, ask and it's on
The Trade-Off
One origin, said out loud
A real answer helps you decide. A vague claim only helps the host.
One location, and we name it
Your files sit in a London datacentre on the 20i platform. Not 'multiple global locations' — one, and you should be told which one.
Distance is physics, not a feature
Light covers roughly 200 km per millisecond down a fibre, and real routes bend. No host can shorten the run from London to Sydney.
The parts we can actually change
NVMe storage, LiteSpeed caching and a CDN sitting in front of the origin. For most visitors those count for more than raw distance.
Weigh it up before you buy
If nearly all your visitors are in Australia or East Asia, a host with a local origin probably suits you better. We'd rather say so than take the order.
Real Distances
Round trips from where you are
Indicative figures for a well-connected consumer network — an expectation worth setting, not a promise to hide behind.
| Where you are | Round trip | How that feels |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom & Ireland | 5–15 ms | You could not tell it apart from a server down the road. |
| Western & Northern Europe | 10–35 ms | Quick enough that a local host would buy you nothing. |
| Eastern Europe & Turkey | 30–60 ms | Comfortable for browsing, and fine for admin work too. |
| US East Coast & Eastern Canada | 70–90 ms | A developer will spot it; a visitor on a cached page will not. |
| West & North Africa | 90–160 ms | Local routing moves this figure more than the distance to us does. |
| US West Coast | 130–150 ms | Put a CDN in front of it. Uncached admin work drags. |
| Middle East | 110–140 ms | Content reads fine; dashboard-heavy work slows down. |
| South Asia | 120–200 ms | We clocked about 200 ms of TCP connect time out of Pakistan. Cached pages hold up; admin panels labour. |
| Southeast & East Asia | 160–230 ms | If this is where your audience lives, a CDN stops being optional. |
| Australia & New Zealand | 250–290 ms | As far from London as the planet allows. Go in with your eyes open. |
| South America | 180–210 ms | Cached delivery passes muster; a round trip to the origin does not. |
Latency is the round trip for one request. A page fires off many of them, which is precisely why caching and a CDN matter more than the raw figure.
About the CDN
What it fixes, and what it won't
A CDN is genuinely useful and routinely oversold. Both columns below are true.
It does fix
- Static files — images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts — handed over from an edge close to your visitor
- Cached HTML, which covers nearly everything a logged-out visitor looks at
- Sudden traffic, since a cached response never troubles the origin at all
It doesn't fix
- The WordPress admin, which is logged in and so never gets cached
- Checkout and account pages, logged in for exactly the same reason
- Database queries and every uncached dynamic request — those still travel to London
- SSH, FTP and file-manager work, which always speaks to the origin directly
Common Questions
Questions about where we host
So where does my site actually run?
In a London datacentre, on the 20i platform we build on. Shared, WordPress, WooCommerce and email plans all run from there. We print it because 'global infrastructure' nearly always means one location the host would rather not name, and that is something you should know before you pay rather than after.
Does where the server sits affect SEO?
Much less than it once did, and far less than most people expect. Google crawls from many places and weighs the speed your real visitors experience, not the straight-line distance to your machine. What counts is real page speed and Core Web Vitals, and caching plus a CDN deal with both directly. Location does not decide which country you rank in either — that follows from your content, your domain, and who links to you. A .de domain with German writing ranks in Germany whether the files sit in Frankfurt or in London.
My visitors are nowhere near London. Will it drag?
For most of them, no — but the answer has two halves and both are true. Anonymous visitors reading cached pages are served from an edge location near them, so London barely enters into it. Logged-in work is another matter: the WordPress admin, checkout, and anything dynamic that cannot be cached has to make the trip to London and back every time. Editing posts from Sydney, you will feel roughly a quarter of a second on each action. Your visitors get the quick version; you, sitting at the admin screen, carry the distance.
What does a CDN really fix?
Static files and cached HTML — images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, and the pages an anonymous visitor sees. Those come from an edge close to them, and that is the bulk of most traffic. What it cannot fix is anything uncacheable: the WordPress admin, checkout, account pages, database queries, SSH and FTP work. Those reach the origin in London every single time. Any host telling you a CDN makes location irrelevant is selling past the facts.
Can I pick a different location?
Not today. We run one London origin, and we would sooner say that plainly than dangle a choice that does not exist. If a local origin is genuinely required for your project, we will tell you straight rather than sell you something that does not fit. For most sites, a CDN in front of London is the better buy.
How do I check the speed for myself first?
Point any independent speed test at one of our live pages from where you are, then run it again from your audience's region — several free tools let you choose the test location. That gives you a measurement instead of our word for it. Every plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee too, so you can put the real site on it and measure properly. If the numbers do not suit your audience, take the refund.
Measure it with your own site.
Thirty days to test real speed from your real audience. If the numbers don't work, take the refund — we won't argue.
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