Getting a virtual cloud server in the UK

Aside from some legal and corporate reasons related to doing business in the United Kingdom, there is a far more technical reason as to why most providers, including us, locate their cloud data centers somewhere else: Internet exchange peerings points.

And the second biggest peering point in the world actually lies just slighty off the UK: Amsterdam.

What is a peering point? It is a special location where carriers, such as BT from the UK and Comcast from the US, exchange traffic. For example, if your Internet provider at home is BT and you are sending a file to a friend using Comcast in the US, that file has to go through a peering point where BT and Comcast connect with each other.

And why is this important to where your cloud server is? Because the closest a server is to a peering point, the better access to it is. And Amsterdam is actually the world's second largest peering point in terms of Internet traffic volume being exchanged between carriers.

So, if you are in the UK and you are looking to move to a virtual cloud server, look south. Look to ColossusCloud, now also serving servers from Amsterdam as well as many other locations.

And for an interesting read, check out Wikipedia's list of all peering exchanges in the world.