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Tools to Locate Your Server
The good news is you do not need a super accurate test, instead, a relatively accurate solution is readily available. All you need is a little understanding of the speed of light and optical fiber! Key pieces of information:
1. Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles per second or 186 miles per millisecond in a vacuum.
2. Fiber has a refractive index of around 1.46.
3. The modern “Internet” is fiber when dealing with long distances.
In case you haven’t noticed, these are not exact calculations.
The next step in your learning process is to understand a “ping” test. You probably have the “ping” tool on your computer already. “Ping” is a simple program used to check network connectivity and performance. It will send a test packet of information out to a specified domain or IP and time how long it takes for that domain or IP to respond. It will report that back to you in “milliseconds.” We have instructions if you have never used this before.
Calculation
After you have completed the ping tests, just take the the resultant milliseconds and multiply it by the speed of light in fiber. This will give you the round trip mileage. Divide by two for the one way distance:
Taken from the average result of the Linux example from above for a ping from Newark, Delaware to Los Angeles, California
77.2 Milliseconds * 186 miles per millisecond / 1.46 refractive index = 9835 miles round trip or 4918 one way.
Wait a millisecond, traveling from Newark, DE to Los Angeles, CA is not almost 5000 miles! Straight line distance is about 2,350 miles. The shortest distance by car from Google is 2700 miles. In this case, because we have a good idea of what cities the physical route goes through, it is about 3,200 miles. So what gives?
Other Variables
There are a bunch of outside factors that influence the “distance”:
1. The test packet must be encoded and decoded by your computer and the target computer.
2. Equipment like switches and routers (try a “trace route“) must interact with your packet to get it to it’s destination.
3. Not all of the route will be over fiber. Most of it will be, but certain parts such as your own Internet connection, will not be.
4. Life isn’t perfect.
Try It Yourself
However, this is a fair way to compare “distances” to locate your server location. Try it out on different sites and compare it to to our East Coast data center (suburban Washington, D.C.) and our West Coast data center (Los Angeles, California). Ping the following to see the difference:
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