Hosting Location

[THL]

When hosting a site is it preferable to host in the country of your target audience?

Does this affect search rankings if hosted in say the US for a UK site thats a .com?

Does a sites ping if its 127ms seem slow ? Is ping rate a big concern with site overall speed?

:unsure:

[AlexJ]

If your machine has 100Mbps connection, I would say it wouldn't make much difference.

[THL]

Yes it does have 100mbit , just curious as I read on a web design site, location makes a difference...mystery to me :unsure:

[Bono]

When hosting a site is it preferable to host in the country of your target audience?

Does this affect search rankings if hosted in say the US for a UK site thats a .com?

Does a sites ping if its 127ms seem slow ? Is ping rate a big concern with site overall speed?

:unsure:

1. When most of people come from that country like local community forum.

2. No they have spiders in almost every country in the world.

3. 127ms ping is not that slow, everything under 200ms is OK.

If site is hosted near your visitors site would look more responsive and it would load really fast. For Dynamic data location doesn't matter that much, but for pictures it would be ideal if customers can pull out at max speed, which most of the time it is not the case with USA >< EU connection. To fix that you can use combination of VPS or dedicated server and CDN which would greatly improve user experience and speed.

[markopolo2002]

I host in the US and live in the UK and to be honest the connections across the water are not great in my opinion, it often takes me longer than I'd like to change pages, login, etc whereas I've received no complaints from anyone in the US therefore we can only assume connectivity over there is much better. Having said that, it sometimes comes down to the ISP as well, I use Virgin Media who are basically pants in every way, shape and form and probably accounts for about 80% of my poor experience - they are well known for bad connections and reliability to the US therefore if I were you I WOULD host in the country you wish to target, especially if it's in the US :)

If you can afford a CDN, do it, this gives you the best of all worlds as your static content is then pulled from the visitors closest server, giving the impression of a lightening fast site!.
Marko

[THL]

I'm also in the UK, and using a US dedicated server...hence my question regarding location... :thumbsup:

Whats CDN if you don't mind me asking?

[markopolo2002]

CDN = Content Delivery Network - basically a CDN comprises of multiple servers across the world, you're content is then distributed across these which means someone from Germany would pull your static content from a German CDN, someone from the UK would pull your content from the UK based CDN, and so on. Usually a CDN consists of servers in all the key area's across the world meaning anyone globally is never too far away from one. So, for example, instead of someone in Russia having to make the data trip all the way to the US they would only have to pull your MySQL and PHP info from your server and would pull your static content (images, etc) from the local CDN server. A CDN however can only serve static content, it can't host stuff like MySQL or PHP, this stuff still has to come from your own server in the US but it's only hitting your server for this info, not having to pull images to the user, etc.

As for the specifics of establishing a CDN to pull your static content, well, that's another story as I've not delved into this just yet, but maybe someone else can give you the lowdown on that if they are already running that kind of setup :)
Marko

[THL]

Ahhh it becomes more clear... :D Thanks