Short answer: a dedicated server in Japan makes sense when your users are in Japan, South Korea or elsewhere in East Asia. Between data centres, round trips from Tokyo take about 12 ms to Osaka, 30 ms to Seoul, 49 ms to Hong Kong and 72 ms to Singapore, and around 100 ms to the US West Coast. Europe and India are much further away. Before you order, check the processor generation, port speed, IP addresses, remote console and backups, and test the route from where your players or customers are.
Latency from Japan, region by region
Microsoft publishes the median round-trip times it measures between its own data-centre regions. Its network latency statistics for the Tokyo and Saitama region give a fair idea of what distance costs:
| From Tokyo to | Median round trip |
|---|---|
| Osaka, Japan | 12 ms |
| Busan, South Korea | 22 ms |
| Seoul, South Korea | 30 ms |
| Hong Kong | 49 ms |
| Singapore | 72 ms |
| Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | 77 ms |
| Jakarta, Indonesia | 85 ms |
| Washington state, USA | 101 ms |
| New South Wales, Australia | 104 ms |
| Chennai, India | 106 ms |
| California, USA | 108 ms |
| Virginia, USA | 162 ms |
| London, UK | 229 ms |
| Frankfurt, Germany | 235 ms |
The pattern is clear. Japan and Korea are very close, Hong Kong and South-East Asia are in reach, and the US West Coast is closer than you might expect. Europe is on the far side of the world.
Real users add their own delay. From a home broadband connection in Kerala, India, we measured the TCP handshake to cloud endpoints (median of seven tries): about 159 ms to Tokyo and to Osaka and 171 ms to Seoul, against 76 ms to Singapore and 36 ms to Mumbai. For an audience in India, a server in India or Singapore is the better base. Japan wins when the users are in Japan or Korea.
Who a Japan dedicated server suits
- Game servers for Japanese and Korean players. Online games feel every round trip, and a server 12 to 30 ms away from most players plays very differently from one 150 ms away.
- Streaming and live audio. Listeners and viewers in the region get short round trips to the server their stream comes from.
- Regional web applications and shops. Sites that sell to Japan or Korea load faster when the server is in the region, especially for logged-in pages that cannot be cached.
- Trading and automation tools. Bots and trading software that talk to services hosted in Tokyo benefit from sitting next to them.
If you have users on both sides of the Pacific, remember the numbers above: Tokyo to California is about 108 ms, so one server can be acceptable for websites but not for fast-paced games. For those, a second server near the other group of players works better.
Personal data: what Japanese rules say about location
This is general information, not legal advice.
- APPI has rules for sending data abroad. Article 28 of Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) says a business must generally get a person’s consent before providing their personal data to a third party in a foreign country. There are exceptions, for example when the recipient keeps protection standards set by Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission. Keeping the data on a server in Japan avoids that question for the server itself. Whether using a foreign hosting provider counts as “providing” data is a question for your lawyer.
- European companies have an easier path. Japan is one of the countries the European Commission has recognised as providing adequate protection for personal data, which makes transfers from the EU simpler. Check with your adviser how that applies to your setup.
- Backups count too. If the live server is in Japan but backups go to another country, the backups are personal data leaving Japan.
What to check before you order
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Processor | The exact model and its generation. Look it up on the maker’s website to see its age, core count and whether it supports ECC memory. |
| Memory and disks | Enough RAM for your workload; SSD for databases; RAID if the plan has two or more disks |
| Port speed | 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps or more, and whether traffic is unmetered |
| IP addresses | How many IPv4 addresses are included, and whether you can add more |
| Remote console | IPMI or KVM access, so you can fix a server that will not boot |
| Delivery and repairs | How long delivery takes and how fast failed parts are replaced |
| Backups and support | Who takes backups, and what help is included |
Work out what the port can carry before you commit. A 30-day month has 2,592,000 seconds, so a 100 Mbps port running flat out moves at most about 32 TB, or about 20 video streams of 5 Mbps at once. A 1 Gbps port is ten times that. For a website, 100 Mbps is usually plenty; for video, downloads or big game updates, size the port to your busiest hour.
Test the route from your users
Ask for a test IP address and measure from where your users are, not from your office:
ping -c 10 203.0.113.10
mtr -r -w -c 20 203.0.113.10Replace the example address with the test IP. ping gives the minimum, average and maximum round trip, and mtr shows each hop, so you can see where delay or packet loss begins. Our MTR guide explains the report. If you have players in Japan, ask one of them to run the same test.
Once the server is delivered, our first-steps checklist for dedicated servers covers access, updates, the firewall and hardware checks.
Japan dedicated servers at Ucartz
Our Japan dedicated servers are self-managed bare-metal machines with full root access. Each plan lists its processor, memory, disks, port speed and IPv4 allocation, so you can compare it with the table above and ask us before ordering if something is unclear. Every server includes Free Basic Managed Support for quick tasks such as access checks, OS reinstalls and DNS pointing, and our engineers can handle hardening, panel installs or migrations per task or per hour. Failed hardware is repaired or replaced within 24 hours of confirming the fault. Backups on self-managed servers are yours to arrange, and dedicated servers are not covered by the 30-day money-back guarantee, so monthly billing is a sensible way to start.
