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Where are you hosted?
10/06/2011
Is location a part of the web hosting decision process?
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it isn't considered at all. Having made the decision to get a website made, a task which is often daunting and complicated in its own right, they are then faced with the problem of finding a host before it can even be viewed.
As difficult as it can sometimes be to comprehend, hosting is a vital part of entering the web universe. There are several key issues that need to be considered when it comes to hosting your website. Paramount amongst them is the location of your host.
Location and communication
Several decisions can play into an individual’s choice of host. One of these is namely customer support. Many argue that customer support is what makes or breaks a hosting company; therefore it is vital that the company you choose as your web host is in a country that speaks a language you can easily communicate with. Think time zones too, for there’s nothing worse than a severe issue occurring at midday for you and trying to get troubleshooting support from a country where its midnight. oi
United States - the default choice?
There is a great amount of hearsay that US based hosting is superior and/or cheaper to those in other countries. Of course, cost is always an important factor. At present, US hosts do have several advantages. Firstly, the size of the web hosting market and amount of competition in the States has led to a downfall in prices. Secondly, the weakness of the US dollar of late has been an added bonus for most EU citizens and recently even Australians, making US services and hosting in particular fairly cost effective.
Hosting offshore
Not all users are regular users, trying to host their business or personal, inoffensive, website. Some have questionable content, possibly illegal content. They're looking for anonymity and protection from the long arm of the law. For that, they will prefer to have their sites in a remote place, with few regulations, where laws, especially copyright laws, are not actively enforced. Offshore hosting is the typical answer to their prayers. In a way, you can think of offshore hosting as the tax haven equivalent of the hosting world. It helps put a smoke screen between the individual operating a site, and the authorities of the country in which they reside. The aim here is simple, but has little to do with what's right from a website hosting point of view. The hosting may be poor quality, slow, unreliable, and expensive, although for those with illegal notions in mind, that's probably of little importance.
Hosting at home
No, not hosting in your own home, but in your home country/area. This may seem for some like the perfect choice, and it has its advantages. Language as mentioned early is always a bonus. In addition to this, you are likely familiar with local rules and regulations, customer protection agencies, know many of the rights that you have as a consumer, and which of these rights can be easily enforced. Furthermore, the option of face-to-face meetings with your host company are often appealing, as well as the idea of hands on help should a problem arise.
It's not all advantages though. Some countries, even continents, have relatively poor Internet connections, being unreliable and/or slow. Some are very expensive too. You need to consider these factors if possible, before reaching a decision whether your country of residence is the correct location choice for your site.
The drive for speed
If you're like most webmasters, then you want your website to load very fast. This is a main web hosting choice criterion, and a valid one too. You also probably want to take control of the whole situation in your own hands, and test the hosting companies out in some way. This leads many new webmasters trying to use ping or some other tools to do assess the speed of the server. That's an easy mistake to do, confusing our individual perception of quality, as being the optimum thing for our website. However, the distance between two points affects the performance of a network. That small ping or the fast loading page you notice is quite likely to be the result of your computer being physically close to the server, or on the contrary, the large distance can influence the results of your measurements negatively.
| Still, you might say, faster is still better, right? I will agree with you, but ask, better for whom? For that's a pitfall many don't manage to avoid. The website is not there for you, the webmaster, it is there for the visitors it is trying to attract. It is for them that the performance must be optimum, and that means that the server should be close to them, if possible/feasible. |
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Now, for a lot of websites, such demography is either unknown or vaguely known. If unknown, starting out with US based hosting is probably a good idea, at least for costs related reasons. However, a website written in Spanish will probably mainly attract traffic from Spain and Latin America, and a little bit from the United States as well. Much of the rest of the world can't read it and won't be searching for it. Hosting under these circumstances seems to be better located somewhere in the Americas. But the subject of the site might make it of interest almost exclusively to Madrid, Spain inhabitants, in which case a server in Spain, or at least in Europe, would be a fairer choice. Search engine optimization considerations Search engines do care about serving their users with relevant content. In trying to do so, they have assumed that domains hosted in a given country may deserve a boost when a person from that area makes a search. It makes some sense, because say Germans are more likely to be the ones to use a German host, and their websites are more likely to be addressing the interests of the German population. The search engines do this by analysing the website's server IP information. Below you can see the information about this website, whreviews.com, as it is provided by whois.domaintools.com. IP location information, as a search engine might see it. We can see there the IP where whreviews.com is hosted, its location, and information about the hosting company, or about the data center where the server is located. Just as this tool can determine the geolocation of an IP based on IP whois, so can a search engine. The server's location is derived from IP ownership information, and we can see it presented here in an easy to read by humans form: the small US flag, followed by the state, city and company. The whole rationale above applies for generic domains (e.g. .com, .net, .org etc.), which are not associated to a territory. However, if you have say a ".de" domain, this would be a clear sign that the domain is German-specific, and this information will supersede the one derived from IP. It would not matter that the site is hosted in the US for example, the site would still be considered to be geotargeted towards the German population. This makes almost perfect sense, because few people or businesses outside Germany, or not targeting the German population in their marketing, would register a .de domain for their site. You don't have to use a .de domain or host in Germany if you're targeting a mostly german audience with your site. In the case of Google at least, you also have the option of setting your website's geographic target via their WebmasterTools. I chose Germany as a random example, but it just so happens that, Matt Cutts, who I like to think of as Google's official advisor on SEO issues (yes, he is a Google employee), gave it as an example too when explaining the same issue: Server Geographic location and SEO. Web hosting company location versus server location Many web hosting companies will offer their hosting to their countrymen, but will actually co-locate or rent their servers in another part of the world. Many European, Asian and Australian hosts do this, with the server location country of choice often being the US, due to cost and overall good connectivity to most of the world, as mentioned earlier. Whichever country they choose to place their servers in, this creates a further problem for you as a potential customer. It does not suffice to find a host in the country where you want your websites hosted (should you decide this to be important for your site), you must also make sure that they have the servers placed where you want them to be. The perfect hosting location? We can safely conclude based on everything written so far, that there is no universally perfect web server location. The answer depends on the person who owns or manages the site, and it depends on the website itself. All the different factors presented in this article must be given proper weight, and a decision that is optimum for the given combination must be reached. The end result is very much a subjective one, because often times the ideal result arising from performance and SEO considerations could be, say Singapore, for a number of reasons, but the costs or the language preference might outweigh those and lead to a performance compromise that is a long term feasible option. |
For the purpose of remaining unbiased this great article was sourced from http://whreviews.com/web-hosting-location.htm
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