For a game server, location decides how the game feels. Hardware sets the ceiling for how many players and entities you can handle, but ping decides whether shots register where players aimed and whether movement feels smooth. Get the city right first.
How much ping is acceptable?
- Under 30 ms: feels local. Ideal for shooters and competitive play.
- 30 to 60 ms: fine for survival, sandbox and most multiplayer games.
- 60 to 100 ms: playable for slower games; noticeable in shooters.
- Over 100 ms: players on the far side will complain.
Europe is compact enough that a central city keeps most players in the first two bands. The trick is knowing where the bulk of your community actually is.
Match the city to the community
- Pan-European or international community: Frankfurt or Amsterdam. Both keep players from London to Warsaw within a short hop.
- UK and Irish players: London.
- French and Belgian players: Paris.
- German-speaking players: Frankfurt, or Zurich for a Swiss and Austrian lean.
- Italian players: Milan.
- Spanish and Portuguese players: Madrid.
- Eastern European and Nordic players: Frankfurt or Amsterdam are usually the closest of our cities.
Not sure? The map on the home page estimates ping from any part of Europe to every city.
Find out where your players are
If you already run a server somewhere, its logs show player IP addresses, and a GeoIP lookup tells you which countries they come from. Discord member lists, store analytics and server browser stats give similar clues. Put the server where the median player is, not where the most vocal one is.
Hardware, briefly
Most game servers run their simulation on a single thread, so a fast modern core matters more than core count for one instance. Give each instance enough memory (4 to 8 GB for Minecraft, 12 to 16 GB for Rust or ARK) and always use SSD or NVMe storage so world saves do not freeze the game. The game server page lists machines that meet those basics.
Test before launch
Ask five or ten regulars to ping each candidate city's test IP from the looking glass page and post the results. Choose the city with the best median, not the best single result. It takes ten minutes and saves a migration later.
