As any owner of a website knows, one of the key factors contributing to the success or failure of the site is the reliability of its web host or server. It goes without saying that choosing a web hosting provider is a process that needs to be undertaken with extreme care and planning. With the number of choices in providers increasing exponentially, this choice keeps getting more and more difficult day by day.
Site owners spend countless hours and lots of energy just trying to figure out things like what a hosting provider has to offer, how they are different from other providers and whether or not there is an advantage to choosing them over another one as their final option.
Among the key factors they look into are the amount of disk space they offer, the size of bandwidth they allow for user-consumption, the security features they have in place, the ease of use in building and administrating sites and their reliability (usually determined by the reviews of other users). Once these have been taken into consideration the matter of how much it would all cost comes up – and with the rate at which the cost of hosting is dropping, it further complicates the decision-making process.
But what most of these people overlook is the location of the hosting providers’ servers.
But, does the location of a web host or server really matter when it comes to the day-to-day performance of a website? If so, does the location have a major impact on the performance, or is something that can be overlooked for the sake of the other advantages and features mentioned above?
The short answer is, “yes”. Server location does matter and it does play a significant role in a website’s performance.
The longer version of the answer would be:
If a website is relatively “static,” it really wouldn’t matter where the server was located. By static it is implied that the data or content is updated at intervals – it could be hours, days or weeks. Good site examples would be blogs, news and ecommerce sites. People would access these sites without being in any particular hurry.
A person browsing from across the Atlantic wouldn’t mind the fractions of seconds it would take for a particular US news-website’s pages to load. As long as the time was kept unnoticeably short, he or she would be happy to continue browsing.
But imagine this same person were to log in to a gaming or movie-streaming site. The lag of even a micro-second would have a huge impact on the entertainment value of the game or movie – something the visitor was eagerly looking forward to.
The location of the servers would create delays in two ways. The first, as mentioned above, would be directly because of the distance the visitor had from the server. The second would be the lag that would be created by other players (in the case of a gaming site) who would be adding to the lag because they too were located far away and were interacting with the server.
The obvious solution would be for the web hosting provider to make servers available in locations that are as close as possible to the intended audience/visitors. A website that mainly catered to a US audience would be doing them a great disfavor by locating its servers offshore in, say, Australia. It would in fact be a sure way of losing its clients.
Similarly, it doesn’t need much imagination to figure out that the further away a server is from its target audience, the higher the risk it runs of facing connectivity issues. A visitor accessing a server half way across the world would be bounced back-and-forth between connection devices. Should one such device fail, it would mean delayed connectivity – even if the connection were to be re-routed.
Another way the location of a host or server impacts a website is by its contribution to search engine rankings. Although Google has said, on different occasions, that the physical location of a website (hence the host or server) doesn’t have a large impact on how it is ranked, there are other factors that contribute to its decisions indirectly.
For example, every country in the world has its own specific top-level domain (TLD): The United Kingdom has .uk, France has .fr and Sweden has .se. These TLD’s matter a lot when search engine results are ranked. If two French sites were identical except for their TLD’s, it is the one with the .fr extension that would rank higher than the .com site when being served to searchers.
So, what is the solution here? Well, the best hosting provider for any website is the one that has more than one server. Known as “content delivery networks” or CDNs, providers can put copies of their clients’ websites on servers that are located in various locations across the world. When a request for a page is made by a visitor, they are simply routed to (and served) by the host/server that is nearest to them.
Therefore, the lesson to be learned here is: If you don’t have an audience that is located in a specific geographical location, do not choose a server in a specific geographical region – opt for a hosting provider that uses CDNs.
