Munich hosting, sized for a documentation library

Automotive and industrial groups are headquartered here, insurance money sits behind them, and a belt of Mittelstand manufacturers in the surrounding towns quietly leads its global niches. Their websites are trade-fair stands that never close, and they are read by engineers who will notice if a datasheet stalls.

So this page covers what such a site actually costs to deliver: the documents, the languages, the legacy application nobody is rewriting, and where the London hop fits into the arithmetic.

Give each language its own URL and declare hreflang in both directions. Every tree then caches independently and serves pre-built, so the English documentation an American engineer opens is exactly as quick as the German original. Switching language on one URL by cookie makes the response vary per visitor and stops the cache storing it — a mistake that costs you the entire audience rather than part of it.

As for how many languages: German and English first, and every language after that paid for by the market that asked for it and translated by somebody who knows the terminology. The structure will carry as many as you want. The discipline is not filling it with output nobody has read.

Southern Germany sits inside the band we publish for Western and Northern Europe: 10–35 ms round trip to our London origin, indicative for a well-connected network. Against the 800 ms Google treats as a good time to first byte, that is a few per cent. Documentation and datasheets serve straight from cache, and a server in Bavaria would not change what an engineer perceives.

Where the round trip is genuinely charged is the uncacheable work — the admin screens, a login on a partner portal, the configurator generating a result per request. At 10–35 ms those add up slowly rather than painfully, which is exactly why this band suits a documentation-led business so well.