Game server ping by city, Australia and NZ

Ping is the round trip between your PC and the server, measured in milliseconds. Our servers are in Sydney, so wherever you are in Australia or New Zealand, your distance from Sydney and the route your connection takes set the lowest ping you can get.

Typical ping to a Sydney server

These are typical ranges on a wired NBN or fibre connection. They are not promises: your provider's routing, Wi-Fi and the time of day all move the number.

Perth and Darwin sit at the top because the traffic crosses the continent on long fibre routes. Regional towns typically add 5 to 20 ms over their nearest capital, more on satellite or fixed-wireless connections.

For comparison, the same game hosted overseas typically lands at 120 to 200 ms from the east coast and more from Perth. That difference is why a server in the same country matters more than which city it is in. How to choose an Australian game server host covers what else to check before you buy.

Ping from New Zealand

New Zealand players join the same Sydney servers, and Auckland is closer to Sydney by cable than Perth is. WonderNetwork measured these round trips between data centres from 12 to 26 September 2026:

A link between two data centres is the best case. At home, the hop from your house to your provider, your provider's own route to Sydney and any Wi-Fi all add to it, so expect your number to be higher. The steps below measure what your own connection gets.

Measure your own ping

Before you buy

Open the games page. The Your ping to Sydney pill under the heading times a few requests from your browser to our Sydney server and shows your number after a few seconds, with no account needed. If the pill disappears, the test couldn't run, so use the ping command below once you have a server.

On your own server

1. Copy the Server address from the left rail of your server panel. It looks like 27.124.105.40:25565, or myserver.servers.playyourway.com.au on a Minecraft server with a custom address.

   

2. Delete the port from the end, if there is one (the colon and everything after it).

3. Open a terminal. On Windows, press Win+R, type cmd and press Enter. On macOS or Linux, open a terminal window.

4. Run ten pings, with your own address in place of the example. On Windows:

   ping -n 10 27.124.105.40

   On macOS or Linux:

   ping -c 10 27.124.105.40

5. Read the summary under the replies. On Windows, the last line ends with Average = 14ms. On macOS and Linux, the last line lists min/avg/max, and the second number is your average.

If every ping times out (Windows prints Request timed out.), the server may be ignoring that kind of test. Use the game's own figure instead. In Minecraft, hover over the signal bars in the server list to see your ping. Rust and most Steam games show ping in the server browser.

What ping is good enough for each game?

• Minecraft: 50 ms is fine and 100 ms is playable. The game is not twitchy; block placement is predicted on your side and combat is forgiving. What players notice is server lag (low TPS), which is about the server's CPU and RAM, not your distance.
• Valheim, Palworld, Terraria, Project Zomboid: these co-op survival games tolerate 50 to 100 ms without much fuss.
• Rust, Garry's Mod combat modes and other shooters: this is where ping matters. Under 30 ms feels crisp, 30 to 60 ms is normal for Australia, and past 100 ms you start losing gunfights because the other player's shots register first. A Perth player on a Sydney server is at a small but real disadvantage against a Sydney player; a Perth player on an overseas server is at a large one.
• ARK: taming and building are fine at 60 ms, but PvP fights start to suffer around that number.

When ping is not the problem

High ping and server lag feel similar but have different fixes. If everyone on the server is rubber-banding at once, or the console shows Can't keep up! Is the server overloaded? (Minecraft's warning), the server is short on CPU or RAM and your own ping is irrelevant. If only you are lagging and others are fine, it is your connection: try a cable, close downloads, and run the ping test above. If your number still sits well above the range for your city, open a ticket under Support (/dashboard/support) with your city, your ping result and the game.