The short version
Choose London if most of your users are in the UK or Ireland or you want UK data residency. Choose Amsterdam if your audience is spread across mainland Europe, you need data to stay inside the EU, or you prefer AMD EPYC processors.
Side by side
| London | Amsterdam | |
|---|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom | Netherlands (EU) |
| Processor | Intel Xeon Gold 6148 | AMD EPYC 7C13 |
| Network | 1 Gbps port | 1 Gbps unmetered |
| Micro / Small / Medium | $5 / $7 / $12 | $6 / $8.40 / $14.40 |
| Max | $26 | $26 |
| Best for | UK and Irish audiences | Mainland EU audiences |
Both regions offer all six plans, every OS image, replicated SSD, unmetered transfer, a dedicated IPv4 and the same control panel.
Latency
London and Amsterdam are only a few milliseconds apart, so either serves Western Europe well. The difference grows at the edges: London is the shorter path to Ireland and the rest of the UK, while Amsterdam is closer to Germany, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe. If your analytics show visitors concentrated in one area, place the server there. If you want to test, deploy a Micro server in each region and run mtr or ping from your users' networks before you commit.
Data residency
Since the UK left the EU, the two are separate jurisdictions. UK GDPR and EU GDPR remain closely aligned, and data flows between them are currently permitted, but some contracts and public-sector buyers require data to stay in one or the other. Your server, its disk and its IPv4 address stay in the region you choose at deployment.
Hardware and pricing
London runs Intel Xeon Gold 6148, a good fit for file delivery, game and voice servers, and package mirrors aimed at UK users. Amsterdam runs AMD EPYC 7C13, which performs strongly on per-core and memory-bandwidth heavy tasks like databases and compilation. Amsterdam plans cost 20 percent more on every size except Max, which is $26 everywhere.
Using both
Nothing stops you running one server in each. Common patterns are a primary in one region with a replica or backup target in the other, or separate deployments for UK and EU customers. Each server gets its own dedicated IPv4 and both are managed from the same portal account.