Question

Datacenter AMS3 not in Amsterdam?

Hi there,

We’re a company based in Amsterdam, so we want our droplets in Amsterdam what should be possible. When I do a look up at the IP-addresses of my droplets, they all return London as location.

How is this possible while we have chosen AMS3 as datacenter?

Thanks, Rick


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
February 2, 2018
Accepted Answer

We often add new IP blocks to our data centers to keep up with demand. Unfortunately the system that is used for geoip lookups is simply a database that is not updated in real time. When an IP is reassigned it can take days or even weeks for geoip results to be updated.

You can confirm the location of your droplet by performing a traceroute to it. This will map the route that packets take from your location to your droplet.

On Linux/Mac

traceroute your_droplet_ip

On Windows

tracert your_droplet_ip

The results will show each hop your packets take between your computer and your server. Most backbone providers use airport codes (AMS in this case) to identify the geographical location of many of the nodes that will be listed in the traceroute which will allow you to see the geographical path to your droplet. These results are based on the actual path your packets take rather than a centralized database that might lag behind.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel