Hosting in the Frankfurt metro
Langen, not Frankfurt am Main
Hosts say Frankfurt the way airlines say London. The useful version is more specific: our hardware is in Langen, a town in Hesse just south of Frankfurt Airport, inside what everyone in the industry calls the Frankfurt metro.
The facility is carrier neutral, which means it is not owned by a network operator selling you transit. It runs redundant dark fibre into Equinix FR4-FR8 and the Digital Realty campus in Frankfurt am Main, so the routing you get is the routing of one of the best-connected points in Europe without the machines physically sitting in the most expensive floor space in Germany.
Our company is registered in Salzburg. The servers are not in Austria, and we mention it because the mismatch confuses people who check.
What the carriers actually mean for you
Every server has a 25 Gbps uplink, carried by GTT, NTT, Sparkle, Arelion and Cogent.
A list of Tier-1 names on its own is close to meaningless, so here is the part that matters. Multiple transit providers means a route that goes bad does not take you with it, because traffic can take another one. It also means the path to a given network is usually short, and short paths are what single-digit millisecond latency across Central Europe is made of.
None of that is a promise about your specific route. Which is why we publish a Looking Glass.
The same location argument runs through the DDoS filtering: it happens here, at our own edge, rather than by shipping your traffic to a scrubbing centre in another country and routing what survives back to you. On the Shield line that filtering is always on, and on the standard VPS line it is reactive.
Measure it instead of believing us
There is a Looking Glass at lg.1337hosting.com. Give it an address and it will run a ping and a traceroute from inside our network. If you are deciding between hosts, that is a better use of ten minutes than reading anyone’s latency map, including ours.
Do it from the network your users are actually on. A traceroute from your office says something about your office.
Geolocation, and why your IP might say the wrong thing
Geolocation databases guess, and then they update slowly. We publish a geofeed at /.well-known/geofeed.csv that declares our ranges as Langen, Hesse, Germany. Providers consume it on their own schedule, so a new range can read as the wrong country for a while.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. A streaming service or a payment processor deciding you are somewhere you are not is a support ticket that has nothing to do with your server. If you hit one, the geofeed is the document to send them.
When Frankfurt is the wrong answer
For players and users across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland and northern Italy, this location is close to ideal. That is the case for most of the game servers we host, which is why the per-title pages for FiveM, RAGE:MP, Minecraft and Rust all assume a Central European player base. SA:MP is the exception worth naming: those communities sit a long way from here, so check where your players actually are before putting one in Frankfurt.
For an audience in North America, Asia or Australia, it is not, and no amount of peering fixes the distance. We run one region and we do not have a second one to sell you. If your users are somewhere else, buy somewhere else. A fast server that is 120 milliseconds away still feels like a slow server.
Frequently asked questions
Where exactly is the hardware?
Langen, Germany, a carrier-neutral facility just south of Frankfurt Airport in the Frankfurt metro area. Our company is registered in Salzburg, Austria, and the machines are not there. If you need the registered office rather than the infrastructure, that is in the Impressum.
Why does my IP geolocate to the wrong city?
Geolocation databases infer a location and then take a while to update. We publish a geofeed at /.well-known/geofeed.csv declaring our ranges as Langen, Hesse, and the databases pick it up on their own schedule rather than ours. If a service still has you in the wrong country, that geofeed is the thing to point them at.
What latency should I expect?
Single-digit milliseconds across most of Central Europe, which is what the Frankfurt routing buys. We would rather you measured it than took our word for it, so there is a Looking Glass at lg.1337hosting.com that will run a ping and a traceroute from our network to whatever address you give it.
Is Frankfurt the right choice for a North American audience?
No. Transatlantic latency is physics and no amount of good routing fixes it. If most of your players or users are in North America, host there. We run one region and we would rather say that plainly than sell you a server that will feel slow to the people using it.
Do you have other locations?
No. One region, Langen in the Frankfurt metro. That is a real limitation if you need geographic redundancy or a presence in another market, and it is worth knowing before you buy rather than after.
Does the DDoS filtering happen in Frankfurt too?
Yes. The filtering runs as XDP programs at our own edge on the same network, rather than by redirecting your traffic to a scrubbing centre somewhere else and sending what survives back. That detour is the part of mitigation people actually feel, and not having one is most of why the location matters.