VPS/VDS in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the largest network hub on the west coast and the main US gateway to the Pacific. Trans-Pacific cables from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Australia land on the Southern California coast, and downtown stands One Wilshire, an office tower turned telecom hub where hundreds of carriers exchange traffic. The Any2 and Equinix Internet Exchange points operate nearby. So people usually choose a server in Los Angeles not for America as such, but for its links to Asia and the Pacific region.

Who this location is for

• An audience in the western US: California, Nevada, Arizona. For people in these states a local server gives latency of a few milliseconds.
• Services for the US and Asia at once. Tokyo is about 100–110 ms from Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Taipei about 140–160 ms, Sydney roughly 140 ms. One server serves both sides of the ocean with acceptable latency.
• Media and file delivery. The city is the centre of the film and games industry, and there are many facilities with fat pipes and generous traffic allowances.
• Game servers for players on the west coast and in Oceania.

If your users are mostly in Asia and the US is secondary, it is more honest to look at Asian locations straight away: VPS in Japan or VPS in Singapore. Los Angeles makes sense when you need both markets or when Asian plans with the specs you need are too expensive.

Ping from Europe and the rest of the US

This is the US region furthest from Europe. From Frankfurt and London it is usually 140–150 ms, from Central and Eastern Europe 160–180 ms: traffic crosses the Atlantic and then the whole continent. Within the US, New York is about 60–70 ms away, Dallas 30–35 ms. For a site with an American audience that is no problem, but administering such a server from Europe over RDP is already awkward, and for voice calls or games with European users it does not fit. A general comparison of the coasts is on the VPS in the USA page.

Routes to Asia: what to look at

Los Angeles plans at the same price can differ a lot in the quality of their Asian routes. Some hosts buy ordinary transit, and traffic to Asia takes the cheapest path, sometimes with packet loss at peak hours. Others sell plans with premium routes to Asian carriers' networks — noticeably more expensive, but with lower and more stable latency in the Asian evening. If Asia matters to you, look for route details in the plan description and check the ping to the test IP from the country you need at different times of day.

If some of your users are in mainland China, keep in mind that a number of foreign services are not available there, and this affects how your site works for that audience: third-party fonts, analytics and widgets may fail to load. Check how your project opens for such users before launch.

Within the west coast, Los Angeles has two neighbours. San Jose in Silicon Valley is closer to tech company headquarters and their clouds, and Seattle has slightly shorter links to Japan and Canada. Los Angeles wins on the number of plans and on routes to China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Australia. The three cities are 10–25 ms apart, so choose by where most of your audience is.

What to check in the plan description

• The facility's city. For hosts "Los Angeles" often means the whole metro area: El Segundo, Irvine, Vernon, Anaheim. That is normal, but with cheap plans make sure the server is not in another part of California.
• Attack filtering. West coast facilities that serve game projects are attacked often; basic DDoS protection is included by some hosts and sold separately by others.
• Traffic and port. Check whether the monthly volume is capped and whether the port is shared with neighbours.
• Virtualization type. The cheapest offers may run on OpenVZ or behind NAT without a dedicated IPv4; Docker and network services need KVM and a dedicated address.

California data law and payment

California has the strictest personal data rules in the US: the CCPA and CPRA give residents the right to know what data has been collected about them, to demand its deletion and to opt out of its sale. The requirements apply to companies above certain revenue or user thresholds, but if your project targets Californians, it is best to write the privacy policy with them in mind from the start. If you also serve users in the EU, the GDPR applies on top: choose a host that signs a data processing agreement and covers transfers with standard contractual clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

Servers in Los Angeles are most often paid for by card or PayPal, many hosts accept cryptocurrency as a payment method, and some issue invoices to companies. The payment methods for each plan are in the "Payment" column of the table above.