--- title: "Where to host your game server: Germany, France, the UK or Quebec?" description: "What the country actually changes — latency, applicable law, price — and the constraint we write down plainly: our cheapest rate exists only in Germany. Changing country later does not cost you your world." url: https://tickserv.com/guides/where-to-host-your-game-server site: "TickServ (https://tickserv.com)" lang: en published: 2026-09-01 --- # Where to host your game server: Germany, France, the UK or Quebec? It is the first question anyone asks a host, and the answer is rarely explained: you get sold "servers in France" as an argument, without ever being told what it changes for your game. Here are the three things the country actually affects, and how to choose. ## 1. What the country changes (and what it doesn't) Three things, and only three: - **Latency** — the distance between your players and the machine. It is the only effect you feel with a controller in your hands. - **Which law applies** — where your data physically lives, and under what regime. - **The price** — with us, indirectly: not every country is offered on every performance level (see §3). What the country does **not** change: the power of the machine, the number of players, your world being saved, or how you are billed. At equal size, a server in Gravelines and a server in Germany are the same machine. ## 2. Latency, without an invented figure Let's be straight: we do not publish measured ping figures, because they depend on your ISP as much as on our datacentre. What we can say comes from geography, and it is enough to decide: - **Within Western Europe**, the gap between two neighbouring countries is a few milliseconds. For the games we host — survival, sandbox, co-op — that is **imperceptible**. A French group on a German machine will not see the difference. - **Crossing the Atlantic** is another matter. Light takes an incompressible amount of time to make the round trip through fibre: we are talking tens of milliseconds, and that you do feel. The practical rule fits in one sentence: **pick your players' continent, not their country.** The country is only a real criterion if you have a legal reason to pin it. ⚠️ And if your group is split across the Atlantic, there is no good answer: someone will play far away. Put the server where the **majority** of your players are, or where the people driving the session are. ## 3. The countries we offer — and the constraint worth knowing | Performance level | Available countries | | ----------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | | Eco (shared vCPU) | 🇩🇪 Germany | | Dedicated CPU | 🇩🇪 Germany · 🇫🇷 France · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom · 🇨🇦 Canada — Quebec | This is the part few hosts write down plainly, so here it is: **our cheapest rate exists only in Germany.** The eco level runs on Hetzner, which serves us from Germany; the other countries come from OVHcloud, on our dedicated CPU level, which costs more. In practice, for a French player: your server in Germany at the eco rate, or your server in France at the dedicated CPU rate. Given §2, Germany is the sensible default — unless you have a reason to want France. ## 4. The law: who runs this, and where your data lives TickServ is operated by **GONOTECH**, a French company. The game machines run on **Hetzner** (Germany) and **OVHcloud** (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada) — two European hosts. - **Germany and France**: European Union, GDPR applies directly. - **United Kingdom and Canada**: outside the EU, but both covered by an **adequacy decision** from the European Commission, which allows the transfer with no additional safeguard. For Canada, that decision is limited to commercial organisations subject to the federal Canadian privacy law (_PIPEDA_). If where your data sits matters to you — a club, a school, any organisation that has to justify it — pick France or Germany and you stay inside the Union. ## 5. You can change country later Worth knowing before you decide: **the country is not set in stone at creation.** With the server stopped, you change the country the way you change RAM or performance level, from your dashboard. Your world follows — it is kept on our side, not on the machine, and it is restored on the next start, wherever that machine is. So you can start in Germany at the eco rate, try France on dedicated CPU for a weekend, and come back. What changes is the hourly rate — never your game. ## 6. What happens if the country you picked is full Cloud providers sometimes run out of a given size in a given region. When that happens, we start your machine in another datacentre **on the same continent** — and never anywhere else. A server asked for in Quebec is never moved to Europe, nor the other way round. That is a deliberate rule: a silent fallback across the Atlantic would add tens of milliseconds to your game without a word. We would rather stay on the continent you chose. ## 7. How to choose, in practice - **Your group is in Europe** → Germany, eco level. It is the cheapest, and you will not feel the difference with France. - **Your group is in Europe and EU location matters to you** → France or Germany, on dedicated CPU for France. - **Your group is in North America** → Canada — Quebec, on dedicated CPU. - **You are unsure** → take the default, play one evening, and change it if it bothers you. Server stopped, two clicks, your world follows. > [Create your server](https://tickserv.com/games) · [What it costs, game by game](https://tickserv.com/cost)