**Context**

I am currently a customer of Vultr because I found a discount trial code and have been satisfied so far. I'm trying to host Nextcloud for family and friends (particularly for the Talk app functionality) but we are in Colorado, and as far as I have found, there are no "big name" cloud providers with data centers in CO.

*edit*: as of July, AWS now has a ["Local Zone" in Denver](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/announcing-the-general-availability-of-aws-local-zones-in-denver/)

**Question**

How can I test whether a Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles (or other location available from $CLOUD_PROVIDER) VPS would be sufficiently performant for my needs? As a naïve first guess, I think that geographically close data centers would be better, but I would like to quantify and test that hypothesis.

**What I've Tried So Far**

I registered the domain I'd like to use with Namecheap and paid for the "Premium DNS" feature which claims
> super-fast DNS speeds with global Anycast servers handling the busiest of websites and your queries, and your website 100% available

However, once the initial lookup is done by clients, the IP address will be cached so I'm not sure that that gives me much.

Vultr has a [looking glass feature](https://lax-ca-us-ping.vultr.com/#tests) that lets me see ping statistics to their various data centers, but how does that translate to the performance of hosting e.g. Nextcloud? I'm familiar with `traceroute`, so I can form a picture of the number of network "hops" from me to the data centers, but I have read that that method is not reliable due to many of the hops along the way ignoring the requests.

In summary, I'm missing conceptual pieces of the web app performance puzzle, so any information would be appreciated.

Thanks!