LON1 — our London point of presence — went live last Tuesday and is now accepting customer workloads. This is our third region after Helsinki (HEL1) and Frankfurt (FRA1).
The short version
- Location: Telehouse North Two, Docklands
- Connectivity: LINX 100G, LONAP 100G, private peering with four major UK ISPs
- Round-trip latency from Canary Wharf: p50 1.4 ms, p99 1.9 ms
- Available services: shared hosting, VPS (all tiers), managed WordPress
- Pricing: identical to our other regions
Why London?
Two reasons. First, a real chunk of our UK customer base has been waiting for it. We've had people on Frankfurt-hosted shared plans for years — it works, but "works" and "optimal" aren't the same thing. A 20 ms round-trip ceiling was the best we could offer, and that shows up in TTFB whether you measure it or not.
Second, the financial-services corner of our customer base has requirements we couldn't meet from the continent. A few of them need sub-5 ms connectivity to LSE co-lo facilities for market-data feeds. We can't be the platform for that from Frankfurt. Now we can.
What works on day one
Everything. We don't do "soft launches" where half the features are missing.
- All four shared hosting tiers are available on LON1 at signup.
- All VPS sizes, including the CPU-optimised and memory-optimised variants, are provisionable.
- WordPress one-click installs via Softaculous with Engintron caching enabled by default.
- Daily backups run to HEL1 (geographically separate).
- DDoS protection, SSL provisioning, email accounts — all the standard features.
The one thing that isn't in LON1 yet: our object storage service. That launches next quarter. Until then, UK customers who need object storage use HEL1, which is about 28 ms round-trip.
Migrating from another region
If you're an existing customer on HEL1 or FRA1 and want to move to LON1: open a migration ticket. It's free. The typical move is done inside 24 hours and you approve the DNS cutover. Zero data loss, near-zero downtime (we aim for under 5 seconds; see our NVMe migration write-up for how we keep these tight).
Peering and transit
For the networking-curious: we're multi-homed with two Tier-1 transit providers (Cogent and Arelion) plus public peering on LINX and LONAP, and we've signed private peering agreements with the four UK ISPs that represent about 80% of our observed customer traffic. The effect is that UK-origin traffic to LON1 almost always goes over a direct peering path instead of transit.
We'll publish a full networking writeup with the route maps and some measured latency tables in a couple of weeks. If you care about that level of detail, it'll be on this blog.
What's next
Next region is provisionally scheduled for late Q3 — probably New York (NYC1) or Amsterdam (AMS1) depending on where the rack delivery dates land. We'll announce it when we start accepting pre-orders.
If you want to spin up something on LON1 today, just select "London — LON1" in the region dropdown during checkout. If you'd like a migration from an existing region, open a ticket and we'll take it from there.