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VPS in Seattle: the US Northwest, Canada and a short path to Japan
Seattle is the main network hub of the US Pacific Northwest. The centre of local connectivity is the Westin Building Exchange downtown, home to hundreds of carriers, and next to it runs the Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX), one of the largest exchanges in the US by number of participants. Transpacific cables to Japan and other Asian countries land on the coasts of Washington and neighbouring Oregon, and inland, along the Columbia River, huge cloud campuses have grown up on cheap hydropower. Seattle's VPS market is smaller than Los Angeles', but the city has a clear role of its own.
Who Seattle suits
- Audiences in the US Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana. For them a local server is 15–25 ms closer than a Californian one.
- Users in western Canada. Vancouver is about 5 ms from Seattle, Calgary only slightly more. If Canadian jurisdiction matters, compare with the plans on the VPS in Canada page.
- Services for the US and Japan. From Seattle to Tokyo is usually 90–100 ms, one of the shortest routes from the continental US to Asia. Seoul is about 120–140 ms.
- Development and testing next to the Northwest cloud regions: if your project's main infrastructure is already in those clouds, a helper server in Seattle gets minimal latency to it.
Seattle or Los Angeles
Both cities are on the Pacific coast, and the choice between them comes down to Asia. Los Angeles is better connected to China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Australia, has more plans and a wider choice of cheap configurations. Seattle wins for Japan, Korea and Canada, and for the northern half of the West Coast. The cities are about 25–30 ms apart, so for a website serving all of America the difference is barely noticeable, but for a game server or voice calls it is. If your main audience is in Japan, look straight at VPS in Tokyo. The overall picture by coast is on the VPS in the USA page.
Ping from Europe and the East Coast
From Frankfurt and London to Seattle is usually about 140–150 ms: traffic crosses the Atlantic and then the whole continent. From New York it is about 60–70 ms. For a website, API or backend with an American or Japanese audience this is no obstacle, but managing the server from Europe over remote desktop is uncomfortable, and for games and calls with European users the latency is too high. Test the ping to the host's test IP or looking glass from your own connection.
Where the server actually sits
"Seattle" in a plan description can mean different places. Some data centres are in the city itself, some in the southern suburbs such as Tukwila and Kent. The same name is sometimes used for sites in the centre of the state, across the mountains where electricity is cheaper, or even near Portland, Oregon. Latency to Seattle from such sites ranges from a few to 10–15 ms. For a website it is not critical, but if you chose the city for ping to specific users or a cloud region, ask which data centre it is and run a traceroute after launch.
Also check the traffic allowance, port speed and whether basic DDoS protection is included: on cheap Northwest plans the port may be shared and filtering may be a paid add-on. If you need a Windows server, ask whether the licence is included in the price.
Seattle runs on Pacific Time, eight to nine hours behind Central Europe. Local support's working day starts in the late afternoon or evening European time, so for urgent issues choose hosts with 24/7 support and plan migrations and upgrades ahead.
State law and payment
The US has no general federal personal data law. Since 2024 Washington State has had the My Health My Data Act on health data: if a service collects such information about state residents, it needs separate consent and a published policy. An ordinary website or online store is not affected. Hosts handle copyright complaints under the federal DMCA. If you process data of EU residents, GDPR still applies to you as the project owner, so check whether the host offers a data processing agreement.
Seattle plans are paid mainly by card or PayPal; many hosts also accept cryptocurrency as a payment method, and companies can get an invoice. The payment methods for each plan are in the "Payment" column of the table above.