The “100 Locations” Lie: What Cloud Providers Actually Mean by Region

Take a look at almost any hosting provider’s website, and you’ll see the map. It’s usually covered in little flags, dots, and a massive, bold number boasting about their global reach. But what they conveniently leave out is a clear definition of what one of those dots actually represents.

In practice, a “location” can mean four completely different things. You usually only discover which one you bought after you deploy. That’s when a payment gateway blocks your IP, a partner platform puts your account on a verification hold, or your latency spikes because the server you thought was in Lima is actually routing through Miami.

Here is how the industry actually defines these locations behind closed doors. (Note: This has nothing to do with Tier 1/2/3/4 data center facility ratings — those grade a building’s power and cooling redundancy, not who owns the servers inside).

• Tier 1: owned hardware in a specific, named data center. The provider bought the bare metal and the switches, racked them in a specific facility, and pays for the space and cross-connects. You can literally look the building up on Google Maps. If a drive fails, the person responding to your ticket owns the drive.
• Tier 2: leased hardware in a trusted data center. Same high-quality building, but the provider rents the machines monthly from someone else. This is usually fine. The catch is that your provider doesn’t control the hardware refresh cycle: when a drive or a NIC dies, the replacement schedule and the spare parts belong to whoever owns the box, and your ticket waits on their queue.
• Tier 3: virtual PoP (Point of Presence) or Anycast edge. Spoiler: there is no server in that country. It’s just a route announcement and a geolocation database entry that says otherwise. Your traffic actually terminates at a hub that might be 1,000 miles away. This setup is great for caching static website assets via CDN, but absolutely useless if your application requires an IP address to physically originate from that specific country.
• Tier 4: the Reseller. The provider just bought capacity from a local host and slapped their logo on the dashboard. Tech support is basically a game of telephone: you file a ticket with them, they turn around and file a ticket with the real host. Their SLA is just a copy-paste of a policy they have zero control over.

Full Disclosure: Where is*hosting Stands

Since we’re the ones calling this out, it’s only fair we show our own cards.

At is*hosting, we operate across 42 data centers in 40 countries. And to be perfectly clear: every single one of those buildings belongs to someone else. We don’t own the concrete. We publicly list the operators on our data centers page — names like Equinix, Telehouse, Digital Realty, Interxion, Serverius, M247, EdgeUno, plus reliable regional last-mile providers in tougher markets. If a building isn’t on that list, it isn’t ours to sell you.

What is ours is the gear inside. We own the DELL servers and the ARISTA networking equipment. We run redundant ISP connections per location, so if an upstream provider drops in LATAM or the Middle East, traffic reroutes automatically instead of paging you at 3 AM.

We’ll also admit the uncomfortable part: our macOS instances run in a virtualized environment. We don’t rack physical Mac hardware, which means a direct comparison with a provider built around bare-metal Apple machines isn’t a like-for-like comparison, and we’d rather say that here than let you find out at checkout.

How to Fact-Check Any Provider in 5 Minutes

Don’t take their word for it (or ours). Run these tests on the IP they give you before you build your infrastructure on it.

• Check the WHOIS data. Look up the ASN and see who holds the IP block. A local ISP you’ve never heard of means a Tier 4 reseller, or a last-mile handoff worth asking about. Your provider’s own ASN? Ask which facility it’s announced from.
• Look up the RIR allocation. Find the block in RIPE, ARIN, or APNIC and read the country field and any geofeed. Registration country is not physical location: a block registered in the Netherlands can be routed anywhere on Earth. A mismatch isn’t proof of fraud, but it’s a reason to ask questions.
• Run mtr from a server near the claimed city and read the last three hops. If you bought Peru and your packets are still in Miami on the second-to-last hop, they never went to Peru.
• Compare ping times to physics. London to Frankfurt runs about 10–15 ms, Frankfurt to Bucharest 25–35 ms. A “Bucharest” server answering a Frankfurt ping in 3 ms is lying: the cities are 1,450 km apart, and even at two-thirds light speed in glass the round trip can’t beat about 14 ms. At 120 ms from a nearby probe, the box is on another continent, or backhauled through one, which costs you the same either way.

None of these checks require you to open a support ticket, and network physics can’t be argued with.

The Three Questions That Matter

Next time you’re shopping for infrastructure, ask the vendor these three things:

1. What is the name of the facility?
2. What is the ASN, and who owns it?
3. Who are your upstream providers in that specific location?

A Tier 1 or Tier 2 provider will answer all three in a support ticket. A Tier 3 or Tier 4 provider will just send you a link back to their map with all the pretty flags.

If you want to run this test kit against us, grab the cheapest plan we offer — whether that’s a VPS in one of our 40+ locations or a dedicated server — and point mtr at it from wherever your actual users are. Seriously, we’d rather you check.