Where are the servers?

A question came up this weekend.....

Where are the servers located?

If your server is EST timezone, do they geographically locate the hardware close to the east coast? Likewise for the other timezones.

Or is the server time simply used as a means to align the prime time of the players on a zone, making it more likely to find groups at the same time as you are available?



I was of the opinion that Blizzard has one data center (well, hopefully two located more than 200 miles away from eachother, so one can fail over for the other in case of disaster), because that'd be the least expensive for them.

Latency and bandwidth has so much more to do with where you personally sit on the network backbones, than it does with actual geographical physical location.

But my opinion was the laughing stock of those on Vent at the time. Curse you all!!!!




I could understand wanting an Asian datacenter, a European one, and an Oceanic (is that also Asia, or just Australia/NZ?), as the pipelines across the Pacific are generally low performance, and the Atlantic is better but far from ideal, however within the US, once you clear the bottleneck of your local ISP, data traffic on the tier one backbones make little difference from northeast Maine to southwest Califlowernia.

Anybody got inside knowledge on where they locate the servers? Hell, a simple traceroute with a little research to map the IPs to locations would show what I'm looking for, but that's probably beyond how interested I am in actually tracking down an answer.

Instead I'll rely upon the readers :-)