Pick Ashburn if most of your users are on the East Coast or in Europe, or your stack leans on cloud services in Northern Virginia. Pick Chicago if your users are spread across the US and Canada, or your work touches Chicago’s futures markets.
That’s the short answer. Here’s how the two sites differ in practice.
The two sites side by side
| Ashburn | Chicago | |
|---|---|---|
| Facility | Equinix DC3, Loudoun County | Arlington Heights, IL |
| Certifications | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II |
| Best fit | East Coast and Europe | US-wide, Canada, CME |
| Also there | Hyperscaler on-ramps | Our HQ, colocation |
Our Ashburn dedicated servers sit in the densest data center market there is, with direct paths to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. If you run a database on bare metal and a few services in a hyperscaler, being next door to those regions matters more than anything else on this list.
Our Chicago dedicated servers run in our own facility in Arlington Heights, a few minutes from O’Hare, on transit from PCCW, Cogent, GTT and Zayo. Chicago sits in the middle of the map, so it gives the fewest users a bad experience when you only want one server. For trading work, our Chicago network is about 2.5 ms from CME’s matching engine in Aurora.
What shouldn’t decide it
Price, mostly. Builds are priced per configuration in each city, so compare the exact machine you need, not the headline number. Support, the SLA and management plans are the same in both places.
Don’t guess from a map, either. Our looking glass at lg.gigenet.com runs ping, traceroute and MTR from all three of our sites, so you can test from each city to your own users’ networks before you order. Ten minutes of that beats any table, ours included. If you want the data behind the rule above, our Ashburn vs Chicago latency write-up has it.
When the answer is both
If an outage would really hurt, don’t choose. Put the primary where most of your users are and a warm standby in the other city, and let replication run between them. Two metros on different utility grids rarely have a bad day together, and that’s worth more than any single-site uptime figure.
FAQ
Yes. All three of our locations can be interconnected over a private backbone, so replication traffic between your servers doesn’t cross the public internet. Mention it when you ask for a quote.
Then look at Los Angeles, which is our third site, in Digital Realty’s LAX10 building. It’s SOC 2 Type II, and it works well as a primary for Pacific traffic or as a third site next to Chicago or Ashburn.
Still torn, or want a two-city pair priced? Tell us about your users and workload and we’ll recommend a location.
