Why a CDN does not settle the question for a course site
A content delivery network keeps copies of cacheable responses at edge locations. SiteGround says its CDN has 170+ edge locations, and Kinsta's security page says all traffic passes through Cloudflare's global edge network before reaching your site. That helps images, scripts, video thumbnails, downloadable worksheets and anonymous sales pages load from somewhere close to each visitor.
Course platforms are different once a student logs in. The lesson page is personalised, marking a lesson complete writes to the database, a quiz submission is a POST request, and cart and checkout pages are normally excluded from page caching. Those requests travel to the origin server, run PHP and the database there, and travel back. An edge network does not move that work closer to the student. Our guide on Cloudflare APO and logged-in members covers the caching side in more detail.
So the useful question is not where your traffic comes from, but where your logged-in sessions come from. A site whose marketing audience is global but whose paying students are mostly in one region should be hosted for the paying students.
Published locations on 29 October 2026
| Host | Locations published | How the location is chosen | Changing it later |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kinsta | 30 data centers, including Johannesburg, Dubai, Riyadh, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Montreal, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, São Paulo, Bogota, Ashburn, Chicago, Phoenix and San Jose | Chosen per site when you create it in MyKinsta | The locations page does not describe moving a site. Kinsta's infrastructure upgrade page says it is moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, that some previous regions may not be available, and that it emails customers in advance with the new location |
| SiteGround | 11 data centers: Ashburn, Council Bluffs, Dallas, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Eemshaven, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore | Selected at signup; SiteGround says everything in that account lives there | Relocate in the Client Area: per website on StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek, per server on Cloud. May take up to 72 hours, mailboxes and sites may be unreachable by domain, and changes made during relocation may be lost |
| WP Engine | Google Cloud on shared plans: Iowa, South Carolina, Montreal, Belgium, London, Netherlands, Finland, Sydney, Singapore, Tel Aviv. Frankfurt, Taiwan and Tokyo may only be available with upgraded pricing or on Premium. AWS and Azure on Premium plans only | Set when the first site on the account is created; shared plans default to the Google Cloud region nearest the customer | Request through Support; scheduled physical migration; the server IP changes so DNS must be updated unless you use CNAME flattening; the new location must be available on your plan |
| DigitalOcean | 16 Droplet datacenters in 13 cities: New York (3), San Francisco (2), Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Bangalore, Sydney, Atlanta, Richmond, Kansas City, Memphis. Atlanta, Richmond and Kansas City are limited mostly to Premium CPU plans, and Memphis lists only v5 Droplets | Chosen per Droplet when you create it | Snapshot the Droplet, add the snapshot to the target region at no extra cost, create a new Droplet there. Volume snapshots cannot be transferred between regions |
| Liquid Web | Managed applications FAQ: Southfield (Michigan), San Jose (California), Amsterdam, London, Sydney | Not stated in the FAQ; Liquid Web's data center page recommends the location closest to your end users | We did not find a documented relocation process for managed WordPress; ask before buying |
Worked example: one cohort, three regions
Suppose a course has 1,000 active students: 550 in the UK and Europe, 300 on the US East Coast and 150 in Australia. The marketing site gets more US traffic than European traffic, which tempts the owner to pick a US region.
Weight by logged-in activity instead. If European students account for most lesson completions and quiz attempts, a London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Paris origin serves the majority of uncached requests from nearby. US East students then cross the Atlantic for each uncached request, and Australian students make the longest trip. With a CDN in front, all three groups still get images and files from nearby edge locations.
To make the trade-off concrete, imagine a lesson view involves four uncached requests and the extra round trip from Sydney to a European origin adds 250 ms to each. Those are hypothetical figures, not measurements; the point is that the penalty multiplies by the number of uncached requests per page, so a quiz-heavy course feels distance more than a video-only course. Measure your own pages before deciding.
When a CDN is enough and when region matters
| Situation | CDN alone usually enough? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly anonymous sales pages, video hosted on a separate service | Yes | Most responses are cacheable at the edge |
| Logged-in lessons, quizzes, progress tracking, forums | No | Personalised pages and writes go to the origin |
| Live cohort that opens checkout at a fixed time | No | Checkout is uncached and concentrated in one window |
| Legal or contractual data-residency requirement | Not a speed question | WP Engine notes privacy laws may require specific regions; choose by the rule first |
| Students split evenly across three continents | Partly | Pick the largest logged-in group, put a CDN in front, and test the slowest group before launch |
How to decide before you buy
- Export logged-in sessions or enrolments by country from your LMS or analytics. Kinsta suggests the Google Analytics user attributes overview report for visitor location.
- Rank candidate regions from the table above against your top two student locations.
- WP Engine's region article suggests third-party latency tools such as cloudpingtest.com or webping.cloud; only test locations the host actually offers.
- To measure latency yourself, a short-lived DigitalOcean Droplet costs little because bundled plans bill per second; the $6 per month plan is listed at $0.00893 per hour. Destroy it afterwards, because powered-off Droplets are still billed.
- Time a logged-in lesson page and a quiz submission from the farthest student region, not only the home page.
- Write down the region in your launch notes so a later migration does not move the site somewhere worse by default.
Changing region later is a migration
Every host above treats a new region as new infrastructure. SiteGround's relocation can take up to 72 hours and warns that site modifications made during relocation may be lost. WP Engine schedules a physical migration and the IP address changes. On DigitalOcean you add a snapshot to the target region and build a new Droplet from it, so plan for DNS to point at the new server. For Liquid Web managed WordPress we found no documented relocation process, so ask before you buy.
For a course business, schedule a move between cohorts, freeze course edits and enrolments during the copy, and lower DNS TTL in advance. Our guides on lowering TTL and testing a new host with curl resolve cover those steps.
Questions before you decide
Does a CDN make quiz submissions faster for distant students?
Generally no. Quiz submissions and progress saves are uncached writes that run on the origin server, so the origin's location still matters.
Can two sites in one SiteGround account be in different data centers?
SiteGround's data center page says everything in an account lives in the location chosen at signup, but its relocation article says StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek customers can change the location of each website separately afterwards. Confirm with SiteGround before planning around it.
Will Kinsta move my site to a different data center?
Kinsta's infrastructure upgrade page says sites are moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, that some former regions may not be available, and that customers are emailed in advance with the new location. Contact Kinsta support if the proposed region does not suit your students.
Sources & verification
Product details and prices can change. Check the linked provider before buying.
- Kinsta: Data center locations Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- Kinsta: Infrastructure upgrades Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- Kinsta: Secure WordPress hosting Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- SiteGround: Where are SiteGround's servers? Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- SiteGround: Data center locations Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- SiteGround: Can I change my data center? Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- WP Engine: Change a website data center location Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: Regional availability Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: Add Droplet snapshots to other regions Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: Droplet pricing Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean: doctl droplet-action power-off Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- Liquid Web: FAQ Accessed 29 Oct 2026
- Liquid Web: Hosting data centers Accessed 29 Oct 2026
Sources link directly to providers. Product buttons may use separately labeled affiliate links. Read our disclosure.