If your users are in Central and Eastern Europe, the default advice — "put it in Frankfurt" — is not obviously right. Frankfurt is the best-connected city in Europe, and it is also the most expensive location we sell, and for a user in Bucharest or Kraków it is not the closest one. Two of our locations sit inside the region itself: Bucharest and Warsaw. This post is how to choose between them.
The price difference, exactly
Romania is our base price: no location fee at all. Poland carries a per-month location fee that scales with the shape. Everything else about the plans — specs, no setup fee, no traffic quota — is identical:
| Plan | RAM / vCPU / disk | Bucharest | Warsaw | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS I KVM | 2 GB / 1 / 20 GB | €4.00 | €5.00 | +€1.00 |
| VPS II KVM | 4 GB / 2 / 40 GB | €6.00 | €8.00 | +€2.00 |
| VPS III KVM | 8 GB / 2 / 60 GB | €10.00 | €14.00 | +€4.00 |
| VPS IV KVM | 16 GB / 4 / 80 GB | €16.00 | €24.00 | +€8.00 |
| VPS V KVM | 24 GB / 6 / 100 GB | €30.00 | €42.00 | +€12.00 |
| VPS VI KVM | 32 GB / 8 / 120 GB | €58.00 | €74.00 | +€16.00 |
On hourly billing the same difference appears spread across 720 hours: a VPS I is €0.0056 per hour in Bucharest against €0.0070 in Warsaw, and a VPS VI is €0.0806 against €0.1028. Warsaw carries exactly the same location fee as Amsterdam, and both are cheaper than Frankfurt and Vienna, which sit a step above. The full location price list has all five locations side by side.
Pick Bucharest when…
- Price is the deciding factor. It is the cheapest location we have, in every shape, on both hourly and monthly billing. A 32 GB machine is €16 a month less than in Warsaw and €20 less than in Frankfurt.
- Your users are in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia or Greece. The south-eastern corner of Europe is closer to Bucharest than to anywhere else we run.
- The machine does internal work. Build agents, queue workers, batch jobs, backup targets, monitoring collectors — nothing a customer waits on. Put these in the cheapest location and spend the difference on the machines your users actually hit.
- You want the largest choice of nodes. Romania is our home market and where we run the most capacity, which in practice means it is the location least likely to be full when you order.
- You are streaming. Our streaming plans run on nodes we own in Romania, and the Romanian price is €3–€22 a month below every other location depending on the shape.
Pick Warsaw when…
- Your users are in Poland, the Baltics, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. This is the obvious one: serve people from the country they are in when the price difference is a euro or two.
- You want a second EU location with a different path. If your primary is Bucharest, Warsaw gives you a separate city and a different set of upstream paths for a failover or a standby replica. Our two-instance failover write-up covers the pattern.
- You are serving customers who ask where the data lives, and "Poland" is an easier sentence for them than a country they associate with cheap hosting. It is not a technical argument, and it closes deals anyway.
- You need the price step without the Frankfurt price. Warsaw is the cheaper half of the premium tier: the same fee as Amsterdam, less than Frankfurt or Vienna.
Both are EU locations, and that is the point
For GDPR purposes, Romania and Poland are EU member states with the same regime as Germany or the Netherlands. Data at rest in Bucharest is data at rest in the European Union; there is no third-country transfer, no adequacy decision to argue about, no supplementary measures to document. If your compliance requirement is "EU only", the cheapest location satisfies it just as completely as the most expensive one. Our note on EU-only hosting goes into the detail.
Where the choice does matter is if a contract names a country, or names a distance from your customers. That is a paperwork question, not a physics question, and it is worth reading the contract before picking a city.
Do not take our word for the latency
Every hosting company publishes a latency table, and every one of them measured from somewhere convenient. The only measurement that matters is from where your users are, to the machine you would actually buy — and at our hourly prices you can run it yourself for the price of nothing:
- Order a VPS I in Bucharest (€0.0056/hr) and a VPS I in Warsaw (€0.0070/hr).
- Put the same small test endpoint on both — a static page and a TLS handshake are enough.
- Measure from where your users are: your own laptop in the target country, a colleague's connection, a public measurement network, or a browser-based test you send to a handful of real users.
- Compare full page load and TLS handshake, not ICMP ping. Ping tells you about the path; handshakes tell you about the experience.
- Destroy both machines. Two hours of both is about €0.03.
If the difference is under 10 ms for your users, buy the cheaper one and move on. If it is 40 ms, you have your answer, and it cost three cents to find.
Or split them
Nothing says you have to choose. A common layout for a CEE-facing product:
- Application servers in the location closest to the majority of users — Warsaw for a Polish-market product, Bucharest for a Balkan one.
- Database in the same location as the application. Never split these two across countries; every query pays the round trip.
- Everything internal in Bucharest — CI runners, backup targets, monitoring, staging. Cheapest location, no user waiting.
- A standby in the other country if downtime costs you real money.
With VPS I and VPS II shapes that whole layout is well under €30 a month.
When neither is right
If the bulk of your users are in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, pick Frankfurt or Vienna instead — they cost the same as each other, so choose on geography. If your audience is in the UK, Ireland, France or Iberia, Amsterdam is the closest of our locations and carries the same fee as Warsaw. Vienna came back into the picker recently; that story is in the Vienna post.
How Noded Can Help
Both cities carry all six hourly shapes and all six streaming shapes, and you choose the location on the order form — no separate product, no different SKU. Start on the hourly VPS page, pick Romania or Poland, and if you are genuinely unsure, order one of each for an afternoon and measure. If you would like help reading the results, or you are planning a two-country layout, open a ticket and we will go through it.
FAQ
Is a Bucharest VPS slower than a Warsaw VPS?
The hardware shapes and the plan limits are identical; what differs is the network distance to your users. For users in the south-east of Europe, Bucharest is closer. For users in Poland and the Baltics, Warsaw is closer. Measure from where your users are rather than trusting any published table.
Why is Romania cheaper?
It is our home market and where we run the most capacity, so it carries no location fee. Every other location adds a per-month fee that is shown on the order form before you pay.
Are both locations GDPR-compliant?
Both are EU member states, so data stored in either stays inside the European Union. Compliance also depends on what you do with the data, but the hosting location itself raises no transfer question in either case.
Can I move from one to the other later?
Not with a button. Order in the new location, copy your data across, cancel the old machine. On hourly billing the overlap costs a few cents an hour.
Which location should a game server go in?
Whichever is closest to the players, since that is a latency-first workload. For players spread across CEE, Warsaw and Bucharest are both defensible; for a mixed Central European group, Vienna and Frankfurt are worth comparing. See our game hosting page.