The importance of hosting your website in the country of its target market

An often overlooked point to consider when choosing a web hosting provider is the physical location of the server. Research has shown that the average website user will lose patience with a site if the pages consistently take longer than 8 seconds to load. The proliferation of broadband has helped greatly but -something about eliminating the need to cross countries/continents and keep the data transfer local will offer better speeds.

The time for a packet of data to travel half-way round the world then back again is approximately 0.2 seconds.

There are 2 main identifiers that most search engines use to determine the target market for you site. These are the TLD (like .com or .co.uk) and the country that the website is physically hosted in. Ideally both of these identifiers will help the search engines to determine this, but one of the two is usually sufficient.

If your website is a .com site for the UK market, but you chose to host this outside of the UK, then it makes it harder for a user to find your website, as the main identifiers that a search engine uses aren’t telling them that.

Another big reason for this is that roughly 14% of searchers use the “pages from the UK” option when searching with Google. The only way for Google to know to put your website in this restricted part of the engine is if you are identified as a UK website.