Ping, tick rate and server location: why milliseconds matter
Twenty milliseconds or eighty: on paper the difference means nothing, in a firefight it's everything. Ping is one of the most mentioned and least understood terms in gaming — and it sometimes drives server admins to strange choices, like renting a server far away because it's slightly cheaper. Time to lay out the facts: what ping really is, what tick rate has to do with it, when milliseconds become noticeable and why your server's location is the biggest knob you can turn.
What ping really is
Ping is round-trip time: the number of milliseconds a packet of data needs to travel from your PC to the server and back again. When you press a button, that action first has to reach the server, and the result has to come back to you — only then do you see the effect. At 20 ms ping there's at least a fiftieth of a second between your action and its confirmation; at 150 ms, well over a tenth.
An important misconception: ping has nothing to do with the speed of your internet plan. A gigabit fibre line changes nothing about the travel time to a faraway server. Bandwidth is how wide the road is; ping is how long the trip takes.
Why location is the biggest factor
Data travels through fibre at roughly two-thirds of the speed of light — bizarrely fast, but not infinitely fast. Every thousand kilometres of distance simply costs travel time, and reality adds to that: your packets don't travel in a straight line but via a series of routers and junctions (hops), each adding a little delay. You can't optimise against physics: a server on another continent will never give you the ping of a server around the corner, whatever setting you tweak.
That's why server location is the first question when choosing hosting, even before specs and price. Almost every other factor can be improved; distance cannot.
Tick rate: the heartbeat of your server
Where ping is about the network, tick rate is about the server itself. A game server doesn't compute the world continuously but in fixed steps: ticks. Minecraft runs at 20 ticks per second — every 50 ms the server updates the entire world. Other games choose other values; fast shooters usually sit considerably higher, because every intermediate state counts there.
For you as a player or admin, this is the key insight: ping and tick rate stack. A low ping helps little if the server can't keep up with its ticks — everything still feels sluggish, however good your connection is. Conversely, a smoothly ticking server doesn't make up for a high ping. Slowness caused by an overloaded server is fixed with optimisation or a heavier plan; slowness caused by distance only with a different location. Anyone investigating lag complaints therefore first has to figure out which of the two they're dealing with.
When do you notice ping? It differs per genre
| Genre | Ping sensitivity | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Shooters and racing games | High | Hitting or being missed comes down to fractions of seconds; every millisecond counts. |
| Survival and roleplay (DayZ, FiveM) | Medium | Firefights are sensitive, but most of the time you're walking, building and talking. |
| Building and sandbox games (Minecraft, Terraria) | Low to medium | Placing blocks forgives a lot; only PvP suddenly makes ping important. |
| Turn-based and management | Low | The game waits anyway; high ping is cosmetic at most. |
The rule of thumb: the more direct the confrontation between players, the more ping weighs. A building server with occasional PvP survives fine with a few extra milliseconds; a competitive shooter does not.
How to measure your ping
Most games simply show your ping on screen: in the server browser, on the player list (in Minecraft, Tab shows the connection bars) or via a network overlay. You can also measure from the command line with ping followed by your server's address. Two caveats: some servers don't answer such requests or answer them with lower priority, and game traffic sometimes takes a different route — treat it as an indication, not absolute truth.
Measure smartly too: test at different times of day, and test once with a network cable instead of Wi-Fi. Surprisingly often, lag blamed on the server turns out to be a flaky Wi-Fi connection in the attic.
Why a server in the Netherlands is ideal for the Benelux and DACH
The Netherlands is one of the best-connected countries in the world, with Amsterdam among the biggest internet exchanges in Europe. MC-Node's servers run on our own hardware with NVMe storage in the Previder data centre in Hengelo — a stone's throw from the German border. For players from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland that means short routes and thus low ping, whether you run a Minecraft server (from € 0,50 per month) or a FiveM server. A Dutch or German community simply holds the best cards with a server in its own region.
The hidden factors: routing and DDoS
Distance is the biggest factor, but not the only one. Routing determines which path your packets actually take, and that isn't always the shortest; a provider with mediocre connections can still make a geographically nearby server slow. And then there's DDoS: an attack doesn't have to bring your server down to hurt your players — even a modest attack sends pings soaring and gets players rubberbanding. That's why serious, always-on DDoS protection is not a luxury but basic equipment; at MC-Node it's included as standard (how our DDoS protection works).
When does a second location make sense?
If your community grows internationally, the question comes up by itself: should there be a second server, closer to those other players? Be level-headed about it. Within Europe the differences are usually small enough to stay with one central location; the big difference only appears with players on other continents. And a second server also means a split community, double administration and double costs. So the order is: first measure where your players really come from and what ping they have, then invest. Often one well-placed server with decent routing and DDoS protection turns out to be the better choice — and for players in the Benelux and DACH that's a server in the Netherlands.