Poland is the EU's fifth most populous country, and every Baltic capital and Kyiv sit within 9 ms of floor from Warsaw. For game servers, regional services and patch-day delivery that distance is the whole argument. The latency table, the sizing rules and when Warsaw is the wrong pick.
A Warsaw dedicated server is the right home for anything aimed at Poland, the Baltic states or western Ukraine, and a strong second location for any European service whose audience leans east. Poland is the fifth most populous country in the EU, and Warsaw sits within 9 ms of round-trip floor of every Baltic capital and of Kyiv. Serving those users from Frankfurt adds roughly 9 ms to the floor of every round trip — and more for the Baltics. This guide covers who a Warsaw server reaches, the numbers behind it, and the workloads where that distance matters most.
The arithmetic is the same as everywhere in this series: straight-line distance divided by 100 gives the theoretical round-trip floor in milliseconds; real cable routes add 30 to 50% plus a little router delay.
| From Warsaw to | Great-circle | Theoretical floor | Working estimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kraków | 253 km | 2.5 ms | 4–6 ms |
| Vilnius | 393 km | 3.9 ms | 6–8 ms |
| Berlin | 517 km | 5.2 ms | 8–10 ms |
| Prague | 517 km | 5.2 ms | 8–10 ms |
| Budapest | 545 km | 5.4 ms | 8–10 ms |
| Riga | 561 km | 5.6 ms | 8–10 ms |
| Kyiv | 689 km | 6.9 ms | 10–12 ms |
| Stockholm | 810 km | 8.1 ms | 12–14 ms |
| Tallinn | 835 km | 8.3 ms | 12–15 ms |
| Frankfurt | 890 km | 8.9 ms | 13–15 ms |
| Helsinki | 915 km | 9.2 ms | 13–16 ms |
Two things stand out. Everything in Poland is a few milliseconds away, since the country's large cities all lie within about 450 km of the capital. And Vilnius and Riga, a long way from the western hubs, are closer to Warsaw than London is to Frankfurt.
For bulk delivery, a few milliseconds hardly matter: a download from Frankfurt to Gdańsk finishes in roughly the same time as one from Warsaw. For interactive work, they matter a great deal, because round trips stack. A cold HTTPS page load takes three round trips before the first byte arrives, a game sends dozens of updates a second, and a voice call notices every bit of jitter. An extra 9 ms on the floor becomes 27 ms on a page's first byte and a visible disadvantage in a competitive shooter.
That is why services with a large Polish or Baltic audience — game communities, media, e-commerce, fintech — tend to end up running a node in the region even when their primary sits in Frankfurt.
Game servers. Poland has a large and active gaming audience, and game servers are the workload most sensitive to distance. A match server in Warsaw puts Polish players at a few milliseconds and keeps players across central Europe and the Baltics comfortably in range. Game server hosting covers the network side; players per game server works through how many players a machine handles before CPU, not bandwidth, becomes the limit.
Services for Poland. Polish-language shops, SaaS products, media and public-sector work belong in the market they serve, inside the EU and under GDPR.
Baltic and Ukrainian audiences. Vilnius, Riga and Kyiv are all within about 7 ms of floor from Warsaw. For services aimed at those markets from inside the EU, Warsaw is the obvious anchor.
An eastern node in a two-site design. Pair a Warsaw server with Frankfurt or Amsterdam and route users by region. The two sites are close enough to replicate data cheaply and far enough apart to fail independently. For a south-eastern rather than north-eastern lean, Bucharest plays the same role for Romania, the Balkans and Moldova.
Game servers and regional services are usually CPU-bound before they are bandwidth-bound, so start from the workload:
A quick check for a patch day:
peak egress (Gbps) = concurrent downloads × average download speed (Mbps) ÷ 1,000
1,000 downloads × 50 Mbps ÷ 1,000 = 50 Gbps
On an unmetered port, that hour costs the same as an idle one; on a metered plan it is the hour that ruins the month's budget.
The city is a free option at checkout, so Warsaw costs the same as our other 12 locations. Entry prices for the tiers that cover game hosting, regional services and patch days:
| Guaranteed bandwidth | Entry configuration | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps unmetered | Dual Xeon E5-2630 v4, 20 cores, 128 GB | €209 |
| 10 Gbps unmetered | Dual Xeon E5-2630 v4, 20 cores, 128 GB | €659 |
| 50 Gbps unmetered | Dual Xeon Gold 6148, 40 cores, 256 GB | €2,799 |
For single-threaded game servers, look at the EPYC builds on each tier: newer cores run a tick loop markedly faster than the Xeon E5 entry machines. Choose Warsaw in the location selector when you configure; most in-stock builds are online within an hour. The unmetered dedicated server buyer's guide compares all nine tiers by cost per delivered terabyte.
Audiences in western or southern Europe. Paris, Madrid and London are all better served from Amsterdam, Frankfurt or a server in their own region.
A single origin for all of Europe. If one server must reach everyone, a central location keeps the furthest users closer. Warsaw is a second site, or a first site for a Polish or Baltic product, not a pan-European origin.
Latency-critical services for Finland or Sweden. Helsinki and Stockholm are reachable from Warsaw at reasonable latency, but a Nordic audience is served at least as well from Amsterdam, and a server in the Nordics themselves beats both.
Yes. Vilnius is about 393 km from Warsaw and Riga about 561 km, both with round-trip floors under 6 ms; Tallinn is about 835 km. All three are considerably closer to Warsaw than to Frankfurt or Amsterdam.
Warsaw. Polish players reach it in a few milliseconds, while Frankfurt adds about 9 ms of floor to every round trip, and more in practice. For a mixed central European player base, either works; for a Polish community, Warsaw wins.
Yes. Poland is an EU member state, so data on a Warsaw server is stored inside the EU under GDPR, with the same legal position as Frankfurt or Amsterdam.
No. Warsaw is priced like every other location: from €209 a month for 1 Gbps guaranteed, and €659 for 10 Gbps. Stock of a specific build can differ between cities, so check availability before planning a launch date around it.
Marseille faces south and east: it is where 2Africa, PEACE and AAE-1 come ashore. For North Africa it is 650 to 800 km closer than Frankfurt; for the Gulf it is the European end of the cable. The latency table, the video and regional workloads that fit, and the limits.
For users in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Serbia, a server in Frankfurt adds 15 to 20 ms to every round trip. Bucharest removes it at the same price, keeps the data in the EU, and is where our 96 TB storage servers live. The latency table, the workloads and the sizing.
Amsterdam and Frankfurt are under 4 ms apart, so for most of Europe the choice is a wash. At the edges it is not: the UK, Ireland, the Benelux and the Nordics lean Amsterdam. The latency table, the VPN and delivery workloads that suit it, and a sizing rule for each.