Server Location and Latency: Why Falkenstein Matters for European and NA Players

When you’re choosing a game server host, “where the server lives” sits behind everything else. CPU and RAM affect tick rate. Disk speed affects world saves. But network latency — the milliseconds between a player’s click and the server registering it — affects every single moment of the gameplay experience.

Both of Witchly’s game nodes are in Falkenstein, Germany. This post explains why we picked that location, who it’s a great fit for, and how to think honestly about latency for your own player base.

Where Falkenstein actually is

Falkenstein is a small town in southeastern Germany, near the Czech border. It’s also home to several enormous Hetzner datacenters — including FSN1, the campus that hosts both of Witchly’s bare-metal nodes.

What matters for a game server isn’t the city — it’s the network around it. Falkenstein’s datacenters have:

• DE-CIX peering at Frankfurt (~340 km away, single hop). DE-CIX is the world’s largest internet exchange. Anything that peers there reaches Falkenstein with minimal extra hops.
• Direct fiber to Amsterdam (AMS-IX) and London (LINX) — the other two big European exchanges.
• Tier-3 datacenter certification — N+1 redundancy on power and cooling. If a UPS or chiller dies, the building stays up.
• Hetzner’s own backbone connecting Falkenstein, Helsinki, and (via partner peerings) the US East Coast.

Whatever your players’ location, their packets get to Falkenstein through a small number of high-quality hops.

Who Falkenstein is good for

Realistic latency expectations from Falkenstein:

• Western Europe (Germany, Netherlands, France, UK, Belgium, Scandinavia, Northern Italy): typically excellent. Most players see ping in the low double digits.
• Central / Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Romania): good. The DE-CIX/AMS-IX peering reaches most of these in single-digit-to-low-double-digit hops.
• US East Coast (NY, Boston, DC, Atlanta): acceptable — usually around 80-110 ms transatlantic latency over the major carriers Hetzner peers with.
• US West Coast / Canada West: workable for cooperative games, less ideal for competitive shooters. Cross-continental latency adds 60-90 ms on top of US East numbers.
• Asia-Pacific: not the right pick. Falkenstein-to-Asia routes go through US peerings and add 200+ ms. If your community is primarily APAC, a Singapore or Tokyo host will serve them better than us.

We don’t publish hard ping numbers because honest numbers depend on which ISP each player uses. Comcast in Boston and Verizon FiOS in Boston take different paths to Falkenstein, and both differ from Deutsche Telekom in Berlin. The only number that matters is what your specific players see.

How to test before you commit

If you’re choosing between us and a host in another region, the honest test is measure ping from your actual players’ machines, not from a benchmark site that shows you a global average.

Two ways to do this:

1. ping from a player’s terminal. Once your server is deployed, the dashboard Network tab shows the public IP. Have a few players run ping <ip> (or pathping on Windows for hop-by-hop visibility). The first response is reliable; the steady-state ping after 10-20 packets is what their gameplay will feel like.
2. Just play and watch latency. Most game clients show ping in their multiplayer scoreboard. Spin up a free-tier server, invite three players from your community, and check.

For Minecraft specifically: the rule of thumb is anything under ~80 ms feels native, 80-150 ms is playable, and over 200 ms produces noticeable rubber-banding during PvP or block placement.

Why we don’t run multi-region (yet)

A common question we get: “Why not have a US node and an EU node?”

The honest answer is scale. Multi-region game-server hosting is solved at scale by big providers running thousands of servers per node and amortizing cross-region operations cost. At our current size, splitting between two regions would mean two half-utilized nodes and twice the operational surface area (DNS routing, monitoring, on-call, deployment) — for marginal latency improvement compared to picking one well-located region.

What we get from a single Falkenstein deployment:

• Both Free and Elite nodes physically adjacent (same Hetzner campus). No cross-region traffic between management and game nodes.
• Lower failure modes — one router, one upstream, one BGP session to monitor.
• All players hit the same node, so anti-cheat heuristics and shared world databases are simple.

When we have the volume to justify it, the next datacenter on our list is Helsinki (Hetzner’s other European campus) — that gives Eastern European players slightly better routing while still keeping operational simplicity for the team. We’re not there yet.

How latency hits different game types

Latency budgets differ a lot by genre:

• Minecraft (Java/Bedrock): very forgiving. Block placement and combat tolerate 100+ ms because the client predicts most actions. Even at 200 ms, a player experiences “this server feels a bit laggy” rather than “unplayable.”
• Hytale: similar to Minecraft — block-based gameplay with client-side prediction.
• Rust: sensitive. The hit-registration model doesn’t tolerate >150 ms well; competitive PvP players will feel the difference between a 30 ms server and a 100 ms server.
• Palworld (multiplayer dedicated): moderate sensitivity. Movement is forgiving; combat against other players is less so.
• Self-hosted apps (Lavalink, databases, etc.): latency to Discord’s voice gateways or your own bot’s machine matters more than to player machines. Lavalink to Discord’s EU voice servers from Falkenstein: low.
• Language runtimes: depends entirely on what you’re hosting. A web service for European users is great. A web service for Asian users is not.

Bottom line

If your community is mostly in Europe or the US East Coast, Falkenstein is one of the best locations on the continent — the network around it is what makes it work, not the city itself. If your community is in APAC or US West, we’re upfront that this isn’t the right host for you yet.

Our infrastructure page has the full hardware breakdown for both nodes — witchly.host/infrastructure — and the FAQ has the short version on locations if you want a quick reference.