High ping is a common complaint and a rare diagnosis: almost nobody measures before drawing conclusions. And "the ping is bad" can mean three very different things — high latency, unstable latency or packet loss —, each with its own cause and fix.
| What it is | What it measures | How you notice it |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | Round-trip time of a packet | Constant delay between acting and seeing the result |
| Jitter | Variation in latency between packets | Short freezes, rubber-banding, choppy voice |
| Packet loss | % of packets that don't arrive | Freezing, disconnects, ignored commands |
A stable 60 ms latency is far less annoying than 30 ms swinging between 20 and 200. That's why "my ping is low but the game stutters" isn't a contradiction: the average is fine and the variation is terrible.
The floor is physical: the distance between you and the server. A packet can't travel faster than light in fiber, and the real path is never a straight line. São Paulo → Recife has a minimum of a few dozen milliseconds that no configuration can beat — and from Europe or North America to São Paulo the floor is well above 100 ms.
Above that floor, what matters:
What does not determine latency: your plan's speed. 500 Mb doesn't arrive sooner than 100 Mb — bandwidth is how much fits per second, latency is how long it takes to start arriving. They're different quantities, and switching plans to "improve ping" almost never works.
RedHosting's infrastructure is in the Ascenty SP4 datacenter, in São Paulo, with a direct connection to PTT Brasil — the national internet exchange. That's what shortens the route to Brazilian providers, compared with hosting outside the country. For players and visitors in Brazil and South America, it's where the lowest latency is.
A single measurement tells you nothing. Send 30 packets and look at the summary at the end.
On Windows:
ping -n 30 YOUR_IPOn Linux and macOS:
ping -c 30 YOUR_IPThe last line has the four numbers that matter: minimum, average, maximum and deviation. The gap between minimum and maximum is your jitter. The line above shows packet loss as a percentage.
ping tells you it's bad; the route trace tells you where. On Windows:
tracert YOUR_IPOn Linux and macOS, mtr is much better because it measures continuously instead of just once:
mtr -r -c 100 YOUR_IPRead it top to bottom looking for the hop where latency goes up and never comes back down. That hop is where the problem starts.
Because they measure different things. ping measures a packet's trip across the network. The number in the game includes the trip plus the time the server took to process the tick and reply.
The difference between the two is the diagnosis:
| network ping | in-game ping | The problem is |
|---|---|---|
| low | low | Nowhere — everything is fine |
| high | high | In the network: route, Wi-Fi or saturated link |
| low | high | In the server: low TPS, processing overload |
The third case is the most misread: the network is great and it's the server that can't keep up. In that case the fix has nothing to do with the internet — it's in How to improve server performance.
In order of what usually pays off most
mtr to your provider when things get worse on a hop in their network — with the trace in hand, the ticket moves.
If the trace shows the problem starting inside RedHosting's infrastructure, open a ticket at financeiro.redhosting.com.br or message us on WhatsApp at +55 11 98833-3902 with the mtr or tracert output pasted in. With the trace, diagnosis starts in the first reply.
ping -n 30 YOUR_IP on Windows or ping -c 30 YOUR_IP on Linux and macOS. What matters is the summary on the last line: minimum, average, maximum and packet loss. A single measurement tells you nothing.