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VPS in Frankfurt: when connectivity is worth paying extra for
Frankfurt am Main is the main network crossroads of continental Europe. It is a small city by capital standards, yet the backbones between Western and Eastern Europe run through it, links from Asia and the Middle East land here, and hundreds of carriers have nodes in its data centres. When a US or Asian host opens a single EU location, it is almost always Frankfurt or Amsterdam.
What makes Frankfurt a hub
The core is the DE-CIX exchange, which connects carriers, clouds, CDNs and large content platforms. Its switches are not in one building but in several dozen data centres across the city and the Rhine-Main region, so a server in practically any Frankfurt facility is one or two hops from the network you need. The stock exchange, banks and financial services operate nearby, and the global clouds run their main European regions here.
That is also where the price comes from. Power and space in the city are limited, the authorities control where new halls can be built, and rack space costs more than in the provinces. So a server with the same resources is usually more expensive in Frankfurt than in Falkenstein or Nuremberg. An overview of the whole country, including GDPR and abuse rules, is on the VPS in Germany page.
Latency from Frankfurt
- Amsterdam, Brussels and Zurich 5–10 ms, Paris and London around 10–15 ms;
- Warsaw, Prague and Vienna 10–20 ms;
- Madrid, Lisbon, Stockholm and Helsinki usually 25–40 ms;
- the US east coast around 80–90 ms, the west coast about 150 ms.
Frankfurt sits close to the geometric centre of the European audience: the spread of ping across the EU is smaller than for locations on the edges of the continent.
A large share of traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Asia also passes through Frankfurt: overland backbones from the east and links from cables landing on the Mediterranean coast arrive here. So a service with users in Turkey, the Gulf states or India usually gets shorter routes from Frankfurt than from London or Amsterdam. For a North American audience it is the other way round: western locations are closer to the transatlantic cables.
Who gets value from paying more for Frankfurt
- Services with an audience all over Europe that need an even response from Lisbon to Warsaw: APIs, SaaS, game servers for European players.
- Cloud-bound projects: if your database or storage lives in a Frankfurt cloud region, a server next to it cuts latency to a fraction of a millisecond and saves on the cloud's paid egress traffic.
- Trading and financial APIs that need a short path to European exchanges and brokers; see VPS for Forex.
- A corporate network node for offices in several EU countries: staff in Poland, France and Italy connect to one gateway with roughly the same latency.
If the job is backups, a CI runner or a site for a single country's audience, there is no point paying for connectivity: provincial German locations or Amsterdam give the same channel quality for such workloads.
What to check when a plan says "Frankfurt"
In the catalogue the city comes from the host's list of locations, and it is not always the exact address of the server. Typical cases:
- "Frankfurt" as a region. The facility may be in a neighbouring town of the metro area. That does not matter for latency, but if you need two servers in different buildings, ask for the data centre names.
- A server in another German city. Some resellers write "Frankfurt" for any German location. Check the test IP: real Frankfurt is a few milliseconds from neighbouring European capitals.
- An address registered outside Germany. With US and Asian hosts, IP blocks are sometimes listed in the parent company's country. If your service detects the region by IP, check geolocation in several databases.
- Type of connection. "Connected to DE-CIX" does not mean the plan has good transit to your users' networks. A traceroute to the test IP tells you more than the partner list on the website.
Payment works as it does across Germany: most hosts take cards and PayPal, many issue VAT invoices for EU companies, and some accept cryptocurrency as a payment method; the "Payment" column shows what is available for each plan.