Web Hosting Location
Location – Location – Location
Our Web Hosting advice series helps you find the right web hosting location for your website. Choosing a website hosting company is tedious and time consuming wether starting a new website or looking for a new hosting company.
The locality of the web hosting company and essentially your website is a big deal. The whereabouts of your audience is also often overlooked but can be proven to be a critical point. Use our web hosting advice series to learn about the things you need to consider. We will also show you why they matter, and what to avoid too.
Why does web hosting location matter?
- Data protection and GDPR laws. (Updated for 2019)
- Performance of website for visitors.
- Reduced marketing costs.
- Search rankings for target audience.
Data Protection and GDPR Laws affecting your web hosting location.
Have you ever signed up for something online only to then find that you get a flood of spam emails? Privacy and Data Protection laws are very different from country to country and not all countries adhere to GDPR. How would handle a situation where your hosting company abroad sold your details to a marketing company? Facebook and many others have done it. Your details are big business and you often dont have any powers to stop them.
Our web hosting recommendation is to protect your data and host your website within your country of residence.
How the location of your website affects its performance for visitors.
Website performance starts with the simple laws of physics. The further your data has to travel to reach the visitor, the longer it takes.
A small amount of data sent to a website within the same city has a typical response time of 15 to 25 milliseconds.
That same request from London to a server in Florida, increases the response time to approx 250 to 300 milliseconds.
Host your website 3000 miles further away on the West Coast of the US and the response times are almost double. Your website can take considerably longer to load than one that is hosted locally to your audience.
A fast website hosted locally avoids driving away visitors as pages load fast and your website is responsive. Hosting your UK website within the UK also builds trust with your website visitors.
The location of your website really can reduce marketing costs!
If you choose the best web hosting location then you can save a lot of money on website marketing. A UK targeted website, hosted within the UK will acheive better search rankings easier than hosting it abroad and spending a lot of money to acheive similar results.
A big brand will have a big marketing budget for backlinks, adverts and sponsoring required to acheive good UK search results, regardless of server location. The rest of the business world can boost their search results and reduce marketing expenditure simply by locating their website in the UK.
How search rankings are affected by the location of your website.
Search Engines know where your website is physically located and have been using this information for many years to rank search results based on where a visitor is searching from. If you are in London and are looking for a Web Hosting Company, search engines will return London based websites higher than those further away or abroad.
This applies to any website such as business or recreational services. Try it and see for yourself.
Website performance is one of the factors that affect your natural search engine rankings. This means if your website targets a UK audience and is hosted within the UK, its performance will have the right foundations for success.
Google for example use Page Speed Insights as a website ranking factor. Fast responsive websites rank well and ranking well means more website visitors.
Tips and techniques to avoid NON-UK Web Hosting Comapnies:
Be wary of companies claiming to be a UK Web Host but who are hosting their websites abroad. This is a likely sign that they are simply reselling another companies hosting.
How do you know if the website host you have found is actually a UK web hosting company? Really easily, just put in the website address of any web hosting company here Only the domain name, no www or https at all.
If you use FireFox Web Browser then there is a fantastic browser plug-ins that can show you the physical location of any website as soon as it loads.
A genuine UK Web Hosting Company will NOT be based outside the UK.
A common problem with many individual resellers and even web design agencies is to use the cheapest web hosting location possible in another country, while claiming to be a UK Host simply on the grounds that they are based in the UK, not their websites.
