Ping times

[tgonhawk1]

In another thread, a user asked about latency between Hawkhost servers, and Brian answered as follows:
> Latency between any two services with us (shared, SD, reseller, compute) within the same datacenter/location should be sub-1ms. Here's the output [ from PING, showing results of < 1ms ].

I thought I'd make the point that even outside the same infrastructure, it can be pretty quick, so I tried some experiments.
The results were rather surprising.

I have Hawkhost shared hosting at two locations: New York City and Dallas.
(Or so I thought: using IP address lookup services, I am told those are in Seacaucus, NJ (which is close enough), and somewhere in Virginia.
I'll assume that the latter is because of some out of date database somewhere.)

I have a couple of VPSes (from other providers), one in New York City (or perhaps New Jersey) and one in Dallas.
I tried doing PING among all these various servers and got these results.

Both directions between the VPS servers: 10/10 packets received, average time 38 ms.

Incoming to Hawkhost shared server in Dallas: (or is it Virginia?)
No packets lost, times were:
From NYC: 79 ms.
From California: 56 ms
From Dallas: 68 ms <<< very surprising!  (see below)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Incoming to Hawkhost shared server in New York:
NYC VPS -> Hawkhost NYC: 4/10 received, avg 1.59 ms (repeated later and 10/10 received)
California PC -> Hawkhost NYC 2/10 received, avg 82 ms (repeated later and 7/10 received)
Dallas VPS -> Hawkhost NYC 3/10 received, avg 36.7 ms (repeated later and 4/10 received)

More packets were lost than received!
But the times were more or less in line with what might be expected.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

More about pinging Dallas:

The above numbers (68 ms) is when I ping to my domain.
In that case, ping says the server is
198.252.104.151-static.reverse.arandomserver.com

But noticing that my webmail is on dal210.hawkhost.com,
I tried directing ping THERE and it's a different IP address
198.252.105.24 and it responds without losing any packets
in about 1 ms, which is what I was expecting in the same city!