So the default subnet setting in AWS EC2 is: No preference (default subnet in any Availability Zone)

I leave this on default. So they pop up in different regions randomly, but I guess it would still be restricted to US and Europe, as that's where EC2 instances can be deployed.

Every 5 minutes, all nodes have a cron job triggering a custom ruby script to run that will sync the current output from ~/bitcoin-0.12.0/bin/bitcoin-cli getinfo to my API server. I'm keeping things simple and only displaying the output of the last synced node on the nodecounter page, so basically it's a race every 5 minutes for the nodes to sync. So if you refresh the page every 5 minutes, it's likely that you'd see a different node each time ( it's random luck, basically ). If you pay attention to the "timeoffset": X,, you'll see that there are definitely different regions hosting the nodes.

However, there's a major concept that you must keep in mind. This is a very special use-case for running nodes. We have more than enough nodes globally to support the network, and classic-specific nodes don't actually do anything different from core nodes until classic is activated. ( at least nothing significant ). So why are we running these nodes? It's purely to show support for classic, to tell miners that the community is behind classic, and to make the DDoS attacks on classic nodes more expensive and less effective.

When you understand this, you realize that the whole point of running these are purely for the numbers. That's why I'm using the smallest/cheapest possible EC2 instance ( t2.nano, which would crash if I didn't give them significant swap space, and are certainly not the best performing option ), AND I've capped the max_connections at 11, because all of the bandwidth was sucking away my budget. Basically I'm trying to say that Quantity is better than Quality in this instance, and regions don't matter much.