VPS/VDS in Kazan

Kazan is the main hosting centre of the Volga region. Commercial data centres operate in the city and in nearby Innopolis, backbones from Moscow to the Urals and Siberia run through Tatarstan, and the local IT market is one of the most developed in the country outside the two capitals. At the same time Moscow isn't far away, so a Kazan server's latency advantage is more modest than that of Siberian or Ural locations. That's why Kazan is chosen not just for ping, but for a combination of regional proximity, a second location in Russia and the terms of a particular host.

Latency to neighbours and to the capital

Benchmarks from Kazan with normal routing:

• Nizhny Novgorod, Cheboksary, Yoshkar-Ola, Izhevsk, Ulyanovsk: single-digit milliseconds;
• Samara, Ufa, Perm: about 5–15 ms;
• Moscow: usually 10–15 ms, Yekaterinburg 15–20 ms, St Petersburg about 20–25 ms.

For a website the difference from a Moscow server is barely noticeable. It becomes noticeable where every request round trip counts: game servers for players in the Volga region, VoIP, remote desktop and networked 1C for offices in the region. If your users are mainly in European Russia and you don't need unusual configurations, compare with the VPS in Moscow selection: there are more plans there, and latency for the Volga region is only slightly higher.

Another group of customers for Kazan locations is local developers and studios. Test environments, CI runners and demo servers for clients are convenient to keep in your own region: the team works with them without delay, and the host's support is in the same time zone and often reachable by phone.

A second location close to the capital

Kazan's most practical role is as a backup city for a Moscow project. The distance is large enough that an outage, a power cut or backbone problems in the capital won't hit both locations at once, and small enough to keep a near-real-time database replica: at 10–15 ms latency, PostgreSQL or MySQL streaming replication runs without noticeable lag. For comparison, Novosibirsk is already 45–60 ms away, which makes a synchronous setup awkward.

If you need a backup even further from Moscow but with moderate latency, look at VPS in Yekaterinburg; the full list of cities is on the VPS in Russia page.

Check that the server really is in Kazan

The city in the selection comes from the host's list of locations. National providers keep several Russian locations, some plans have one price for all cities, and sometimes the plan name points directly to another city. Before paying:

• choose Kazan manually in the order form, since by default the server is almost always created in Moscow;
• check whether the chosen configuration is available in Kazan: promo plans often exist only in the capital;
• ping the test IP from the Volga region: from neighbouring cities a Kazan server is single-digit milliseconds away;
• ask whether the host has its own facility or rents racks from a local data centre: this determines who is responsible for power and links and how quickly outages are resolved.

Law and documents

A Kazan server is in Russia, so it is just as suitable as a Moscow one for storing citizens' personal data under Russia's personal data law 152-FZ. For organisations working with Tatarstan's state information systems, the requirements for protection and certification of the facility are set by the client, and they are worth discussing with the host before signing a contract. A particular feature of the republic is its two official languages, Russian and Tatar: websites of public institutions often need a Tatar version, but that is a requirement for the content, not for the server's location.

Most Kazan hosts issue invoices and closing documents to legal entities; plans with this option are collected in the VPS payable by invoice selection. Private customers pay with Mir cards, and many hosts also accept SBP fast payments. The payment method for each plan is shown in the table above.

Typical configurations

For a CMS site or a Telegram bot, 1–2 GB of memory and an NVMe disk are enough. A database replica should be no weaker than the main server in memory and disk, otherwise the project will slow down noticeably when you fail over to the backup. For 1C with several users, go for 4 GB and 2 cores or more, and for a game server a high-clock CPU. Unlimited traffic on Russian plans often comes at 100 Mbit/s: if backups will travel between Moscow and Kazan, ask whether you can get a gigabit port.