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Comment by dagenix | Hacker News Reader

> If you draw a straight line from San Francisco to Amsterdam you will cross Iceland. Simple Analytics has most customers from the US and Europe, so it makes sense to pick this geographical location.

1. I would be interested to find out if being geographically between San Francisco and Amsterdam is actually good for latency.

2. I think the usual solution to having customers in the US and Europe and wanting to keep latency down, is to setup servers in the US and Europe. So, this strikes me as an odd justification of the decision.

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Pings to 1984.is:

From Palo Alto : round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 183.514/184.035/184.898/0.466 ms

From Amsterdam : round-trip min/avg/max = 36/37/39 ms

From London : round-trip min/avg/max = 48/48/50 ms

Obviously this can vary quite a bit depending on what peering you have at your disposal.

For reference, from Palo Alto to London: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 156.236/156.921/158.271/0.834 ms

For latency, I would choose NY/NJ or similar if you really want one location to serve both EU and US; Though this isn't ideal, it does lower the latency to West Coast US quite a bit.

From San Jose to Newark : min/avg/max/stddev = 73.462/73.547/73.660/0.078 ms

From London to Newark : min/avg/max/stddev = 72.836/74.323/75.600/1.200 ms

From your pings, it seems pretty likely that traffic from your Palo Alto location is going through europe to get to iceland, most likely through London.

The submarine cable map shows one cable going west to greenland and then Canada, one that goes to northern England, and two to Denmark. The Canadian landing isn't very close to any other transatlantic cables, so it may not be very well connected (land connectivity is much harder to map though).

Anyway, making location decisions based on assuming internet distance is similar to physical distance is kind of silly. There are many physically adjacent countries that don't have direct interconnects, it's pretty common for traffic to exchange through somewhere much farther away than the ultimate destination: many south american countries exchange traffic in Miami.

You’re right that it’s silly - from an IP topology layer Iceland might as well be mars. There was a bunch of news several years ago that Iceland was awesome because geothermal but a) there are other grids that are just as good if not better (Norway for ex) and b) doesn’t erase the otherwise terrible trade offs in network and dc options that are available.

Are these all your employer's servers? Or is there a service you utilized?

Looking glasses from Leaseweb and Softlayer, which are very well connected to private and public peerings.

Sadly, packets do not follow great circle paths to their destination, but have to travel inside of existing extremely expensive and extremely long fiber optic cables, laid down by extremely expensive ships custom-built for the purpose.

On which map projection?

Probably great-circle distance.

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