Google Cloud Platform Network: Premium Tier vs Standard Tier

mouakter13 · Post by **mouakter13** » Sat Feb 22, 2025 6:29 am

In today’s race to speed up website loading time, every millisecond matters. The Kinsta team tested and studied the impact of website speed on sales, conversions, user experience, and user engagement.

But there is a caveat. While website optimization is important for improving speed, it's not the only aspect we should be looking at. The hardware and network infrastructure that supports our website and connects it to our visitors also matters. A lot.

Today we'll discuss why Google is investing a lot of money into its network infrastructure, and some of the differences between Google Cloud Platform's premium-tier network and standard-tier network.

Bandwidth and Latency (Key Criteria for Hosting Infrastructure Performance)
Before we dive into the details of Google Cloud benin phone number data networking, it’s important to first understand the following two concepts: bandwidth and latency.

Bandwidth is the network throughput capacity, measured in Mbps; while latency is the delay time or the sum of all the delays that different routers along the path add to our web requests and responses.

Figuratively speaking, bandwidth or throughput can be represented as the capacity of a water hose to allow a certain volume of water to pass through it per second. Latency can be compared to the waiting time from the moment the water pipe is opened until the water starts gushing out.

Because of the small overhead in establishing the connection between different routers, each "hop" along the path adds a small amount of latency to the final requests and responses.

Therefore, the further away the visitor is from the server where the website is hosted, the higher the latency will be. Also, the more fragmented the network is, the higher the latency will be.

We can imagine this using a tool called Traceroute , or tracert on windows. In the following screenshots, we use it to inspect the routing delays for two requests, made from Europe. Specifically:
one to weibo.com: