Why milliseconds to the Nominet backend win drops

Dropcatching is decided in the moment a domain is released and everyone's software races to register it. The winner is whoever's EPP create command reaches Nominet first — so the round-trip time between your server and the Nominet backend is decisive.

This is why the Multicore Dropcatch VPS is placed inside Iron Mountain in Slough, about 3ms from the Nominet backend. From general-purpose hosting elsewhere, that round trip can be many times longer, and every extra millisecond is a head start you're handing to a better-positioned competitor.

Two things combine to make the difference:

1. Location — sitting ~3ms away means your commands physically arrive sooner.
2. Cores — the six-vCPU spec lets a catching engine hold many non-blocking EPP sockets open at once, so it can fire attempts in parallel rather than one after another.

Memory is a smaller factor here: catching is about latency and concurrency, not RAM, which is why the dropcatch node ships with 4 GB rather than a large memory allocation. If you're serious about contested names, the position of the server matters more than almost anything else you can tune.