It’s not every day that a business can celebrate gaining a foothold on a new continent. But we are — and you can, too — with the launch of Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting from the Google Cloud Platform data center in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Johannesburg location (known as africa-south1) is GCP’s only data center in Africa, and Kinsta began provisioning our first VMs there shortly after it went live earlier this year.
Adding South Africa means Kinsta services are available in 37 GCP data centers worldwide.
The Johannesburg data center is available now when creating a new WordPress site within the MyKinsta dashboard for all hosting plans. When you begin to Add a Site in MyKinsta and choose to install WordPress, generate an empty environment, or request the migration of a website from another hosting company, you will have an opportunity to select Johannesburg as your target data center:
Is the Johannesburg data center right for you?
The location of your website’s data center can be an important consideration — influenced by your own location and that of your site’s primary audience. As a (very rough) rule of thumb, the closer a data center is to website visitors, the less impact network latency has on response times.
The freely available GCPing tool is a simple way to gauge the relative impact of latency between GCP data centers and various locations around the world. By default, GCPing will measure latency between your location and Google’s data centers. However, a quality VPN service with a large global footprint can help you simulate connections from distant locations where your site’s visitors might be.
Below, latency to various GCP regions is being measured using a VPN connection opening in Johannesburg. Not surprisingly, the new Johannesburg data center is a top performer.
Factors that include the quality of the user’s connection to the Internet (and any VPN) influence the values reported by GCPing, but they are still valuable for comparing access to different data centers from a particular client location.
Go global with Edge Caching and a CDN
Don’t forget: No matter what data center houses your Kinsta site; our free Edge Caching feature can deliver web pages to the doorsteps of your customers around the world. Our CDN does the same for assets like images and files containing JavaScript libraries, CSS, and fonts.
Edge Caching and the CDN are part of Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration and can deliver cacheable components of your website to an additional 260+ data centers around the world.
If you are not already a Kinsta customer, you can jumpstart your global enterprise with a no-risk trial of a hosting package today.