Where should you host your website?
Perhaps the most ignored aspect of running a website is where it’s actually hosted.
For many people, that’ll be in America simply because most hosting sites that come up when you search are there. However, that’s not always the best place to host your site.
Surely it doesn’t matter? Most people think that but then they’re wrong. Google and other search engines take into account the location of your hosting when they serve up search results. So, for example, if your site is hosted in America and an identical site is hosted in the UK then the UK site will come up ahead of yours on searches performed in the UK or using google.co.uk .
As an example of how significant this effect is in terms of site traffic, we originally hosted our European targetted travel sites in America. On moving them to a European hosting service, the site traffic went up 10 fold within a few weeks even though the only change we made was to change the hosting service. We’ve since moved them to a UK based hosting service and the traffic is around three times that which we had on the European host ie in total moving from the US to the UK meant a 30 fold increase in traffic.
Although these days you can tell google where the major market is (via google’s webmaster tools) you can’t tell the other search engines therefore it’s still worthwhile to have your hosting in the country of your major target audience.
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