Northern Virginia gets called the data center capital of the world for a reason. Our Ashburn dedicated servers sit in Equinix DC3 in Loudoun County, and we’ve run servers in Ashburn since 2014. Here’s what that location actually buys you.
More networks on the same fabric. Ashburn is where networks meet. PeeringDB lists more networks on the Equinix Ashburn exchange than on Equinix Chicago, and more networks in the building means more of your traffic reaches your users’ ISPs directly instead of taking an extra transit hop.
The big clouds next door. AWS us-east-1 is in Northern Virginia, Google’s us-east4 region is in Ashburn, Oracle runs us-ashburn-1 and Azure’s East US region is in Virginia. If you run hybrid, say a database on bare metal with some services in AWS, being in the same metro as us-east-1 matters more than almost anything else on a spec sheet.
East Coast and Europe in reach. Transatlantic cables such as MAREA and Dunant land at Virginia Beach and carry traffic north to the Ashburn cluster. That’s why Ashburn is the natural home for users on the East Coast and in Europe. Here’s what our own network looks like from Ashburn:
| City | Typical round trip to our Ashburn site |
|---|
| New York | about 7 ms |
| Montreal | about 15 ms |
| Atlanta | about 17 ms |
| Boston | about 21 ms |
| Toronto | about 25 ms |
| Miami | about 29 ms |
| Dallas | about 33 ms |
| Los Angeles | about 62 ms |
| London | about 80 ms |
| Frankfurt | about 89 ms |
We measured these on September 30, 2026, with RIPE Atlas: about 15 probes per city, on local ISPs, pinging our Ashburn site. Each figure is the median, so it’s close to what a typical user in that city sees, and the raw results are public. Your own users’ numbers still depend on their ISP and route. Test from your own network with our looking glass at lg.gigenet.com before you order.
Where Ashburn fits with our other sites. Ashburn covers the East Coast and Europe. If your users are spread across the US and Canada, Chicago dedicated servers sit in the middle of the map, on transit from PCCW, Cogent, GTT and Zayo. Los Angeles dedicated servers cover the West Coast and Asia-Pacific routes. If an outage would really hurt, run a primary in Ashburn and a standby in Chicago, linked over our private network. You can compare every build across all three sites on our dedicated servers page.