I bought a server in Hanoi, Google sees it as Hong Kong

The idea was simple. My site has Vietnamese pages, so renting a VPS in Vietnam and checking those pages from there seemed logical — how they rank and what a visitor over there actually sees.

I took a LightNode instance with the Hanoi location. Two days later it was clear I had spent money on something that does not solve the problem I thought it solved.

I am writing this so someone else does not repeat the same step.

Credit where it is due: LightNode is good

Let me be clear up front: the problem is not LightNode as a service. The portal is impressively simple.

From signing up to a running server I did not hit a single snag. No hidden steps, no forms that send you back, no verification that takes half a day. Pick a location, pick a configuration, deploy, done.

The panel is laid out sensibly. The things you actually need are where you would look for them first, not buried three submenus deep. The range of options and locations is serious, especially for a provider of this size.

The Serbia – Vietnam connection is solid given the physical distance. Working over a remote session was perfectly usable, without the lag that makes you give up after ten minutes.

So as hosting — no complaints.

BUT: from Google's point of view, none of that matters

I installed Windows Server 2022, put Chrome on it, signed in to nothing, and ran the first search. The query was my own name, dejandozet.

Two results from that test:

Google served me the English pages, not the Vietnamese ones.
The Google interface itself was entirely in Chinese.

And in the footer, where Google shows the location it detected, it said Hong Kong — even though the IP address is Vietnamese.

That sank the whole idea. The server is in Hanoi, the IP is Vietnamese, and Google still thinks I am in Hong Kong, so it serves me a Chinese interface and the wrong language version of my own site.

Why this happens: a server's physical location and its IP's "location" are not the same thing

The server really is in Hanoi. But almost nothing on the internet knows where a server physically sits — it only knows where the IP range is registered.

Geolocation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Location build their data from whois records and ASN data. If the provider holds that range through an entity registered in Hong Kong, the entire internet will see you as Hong Kong, no matter that the packets physically leave Vietnam.

Here is what that looks like for my actual IP. Whois returns three levels:

Cogent Communications, LLC    COGENT-A          38.0.0.0    - 38.255.255.255
Kaopu Cloud HK Limited        KAOPU-CGNT-NET-1  38.54.0.0   - 38.54.127.255
LightNode-VN                  LIGHTNODE-VN      38.54.30.0  - 38.54.30.255

Read it from the bottom up. My /24 is properly labelled LightNode-VN, so Vietnam. But it sits inside a /17 range belonging to Kaopu Cloud HK Limited, a Hong Kong entity. Above all of it is Cogent, the American transit provider holding the whole 38.0.0.0/8.

This is the heart of the problem. Geolocation databases very often take the country from the wider, parent range rather than from the most specific record underneath it. The "VN" label on my /24 exists, but it is practically invisible. What gets seen is Kaopu Cloud HK.

That is why Google, and not only Google, says Hong Kong. Technically they are not even wrong — the company holding the range really is a Hong Kong one.

The point is that you have no influence over it. The only party that can clean up that record is the provider, not you.

How to check before you buy

Ask the provider for the specific IP, or at least the range, before you pay, then run it through whois and a few geo databases. The key part: do not look only at the narrowest record. Follow the chain upwards and see which company and which country the parent range belongs to. If it says a different country there, chances are that is how you will be seen.

A marketing page that says "Hanoi location" tells you nothing about how the range is registered.

If you have already bought, it is worth asking support to assign you an IP from another range, since they sometimes have cleaner blocks. Filing a correction with MaxMind is possible, but it is slow and does not fix everything, because Google has its own data as well. A geofeed under RFC 8805 can only be published by the owner of the range, meaning the provider, not you.

Second problem: DevTools "Sensors" does not change what you think it changes

My next idea was to work around it through Chrome DevTools, using the Sensors option and manually setting the coordinates of Hanoi.

It does not work, and it is worth understanding why.

The Sensors override changes only navigator.geolocation, the API a site uses to ask the browser for your position. If a page requests location permission, it will get the coordinates you typed in. That is all.

Google does not use that API to decide which country you are in. It uses your IP address. The IP did not change, so nothing changed.

Third problem: it ends up in Search Console

This is the part that worried me most at first. Two days later my test searches and clicks showed up in Google Search Console, neatly recorded as traffic from Hong Kong.

The good news is that it does no harm to the site. Google does not penalise an owner for their own visits and will not "tie" a site to Hong Kong over a handful of clicks. All that happened is that my data got dirty: a few fake impressions and clicks in the HK segment, and positions that mean nothing because they were measured in the wrong market.

GSC has no "exclude my traffic" option of the kind Analytics has. If the volume is small it will dissolve into the average within a couple of weeks. In the meantime, filter the report by country and look only at Vietnam.

What I should have done instead

Here is the gist: to check what search results look like in another country, you do not need a VPS at all.

Google localises results primarily through URL parameters and account settings, not through the IP address. There are tools that do the job better and generate no fake impressions:

Ads Preview and Diagnosis Tool — set the location and language and see the SERP without a single click being counted anywhere.
Any decent SERP tracker — if you track positions regularly, you need one anyway.

When a server in the target country does make sense

Not that the idea is bad in principle. A local server pays off if:

You are testing your own geo redirects or blocks. There you need a real IP from that country and a VPS has no substitute. Just verify that the IP actually geolocates where it should, or you are testing the wrong thing.
You have a legal obligation to keep the data in that jurisdiction.
You are after real speed for local visitors, though even then a CDN is almost always a better and cheaper answer than a single server.

What actually decides which market a site ranks in

This is the part I got backwards at the start. Hosting location is a very weak signal today. What actually works:

hreflang annotations that map language and region clearly
the language and quality of the content itself
a ccTLD domain, if you go that route
local backlinks and mentions

Of everything on that list, hreflang is the only one solved inside the site itself. The site you are reading runs on NoEmStilOK CMS, where each language is a separate folder with its own URLs and the link between language versions is declared automatically — so those annotations are not something I maintain by hand.

On top of that, Googlebot mostly crawls from the US. Serving different content based on the visitor's IP location is therefore a poor strategy, because the bot often never sees the version you meant for the target market.

A short list before you pay

Ask for the specific IP or range before buying, check it in geo databases, and follow the whois chain up to the parent range.
Ask yourself whether you need a real IP from that country, or just a localised SERP. A tool is enough for the second.
If speed is the goal, consider a CDN first.
For test searches use Ads Preview, so you do not dirty Search Console.

Conclusion

I would recommend LightNode as a provider without hesitation. The panel is clean, deployment is fast, there are plenty of options, and the link to Europe holds up. If you need a VPS in Asia, the place is perfectly fine.

Their prices are genuinely good. A server like this costs $0.021 per hour at the time of writing, which is practically free if you need a machine for a couple of days of testing. Billing is hourly, so you do not pay a month up front for something you will shut down on Wednesday.

If after all of this you still need such a server, and for plenty of things it makes real sense, here is the link:

Take a look at LightNode

Note: that is an affiliate link. It does not change the price you pay. Had the service been poor, it would say so above, just as everything else that did not turn out as expected says so.

But if your only reason to buy is that you want to see your pages through the eyes of a visitor from Vietnam — do not. The IP you get does not have to geolocate where the server stands, and Google has the last word on where it thinks you are. In my case that word was Hong Kong, and everything else was for nothing.

It cost me a little money, but also a couple of days of reasoning from the wrong premise. The second one is usually the more expensive.