ImageKit has distributed servers globally for processing and optimizing your images. The images processed and optimized by these ImageKit servers are then delivered to your end users using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as discussed here.

ImageKit's processing servers are located in 6 regions - North California (US West Coast), North Virginia (US East Coast), Frankfurt (Germany), Mumbai (India), Singapore City (Singapore) and Sydney (Australia). Each location comprises of a cluster of servers to process your images along with other necessary infrastructure to ensure fast image delivery and processing of your images. There are no separate charges to avail the benefits of these distributed servers.

Distributing the servers across the globe has two benefits – better redundancy and better performance.

We always strive for 100% uptime. A particular geographical region may get impacted by a natural calamity or network failure. To mitigate the disruption of ImageKit’s service because of these reasons, the servers are spread in multiple regions.

The other benefit of better performance is discussed later in this post.

For every account on ImageKit, there is one core location assigned. Post sign up, when you log in to your ImageKit account for the first time, you will be asked to select the core processing region. You should select a region that is closest to your existing storage or servers (especially, if you plan to integrate them with ImageKit) or closest to your users (especially, if you plan on using ImageKit's media library)

If you are using ImageKit to store the images in the media library and deliver them, then the selection of the core locations is irrelevant as performance across all locations is the same in such cases. Though, it would be best to choose a location closest to your users as this minimizes the CDN <> ImageKit core server latency.

However, if you are using ImageKit to optimize images in one of your existing storages or servers, then selecting the correct core location is critical to achieving good performance. Ideally, the core location selected in ImageKit should be close to the location of the origin storage or server that you are attaching to ImageKit. For example, if the image storage attached to ImageKit is located in the United States and your core server location is set as Singapore, then there would be a lot of latency while fetching images from your image storage in the US from the core server in Singapore. This latency in fetching the images can be cut down by setting the core server location for your account to North Virginia (United States) which is geographically closer to your image storage.

You can check the core location associated with your account in the Settings section of your dashboard. 

If you need to check or change the core server location assigned to your account or want to understand more about how this globally distributed network is used for your account, please create a support ticket from your ImageKit dashboard.