Is the web hosting location important these days?

Question

I was recently looking at some web hosting solutions and some of the providers offered various hosting locations e.g. US or UK based servers.

My question is: does it really make a difference from the performance point of view? Lets say that I am expecting most of the traffic coming from continental Europe?

Would the fact that the servers are based in UK make bigger difference if the traffic was coming from the UK.

Any pros and cons of having a website hosted in the same county as the most of the expected traffic?

Answer 1

It's a big deal for Iceland since the fiber connection to europe is much much larger than to the USA. So it depends on variables like that.

Answer 2

Yes, obviously it does matter to some degree.

This degree depends on the level of your site optimization (size of the pages, usage of AJAX, Flash etc)

Example from my experience. Round-trip from russia to USA is 200ms. It does not make any difference for the small web site optimized for the performance, but it makes a huge usability difference for SmartClient accessing Web API of this site.

Answer 3

Yes, distance = latency = slower. That's why Google, Amazon, and the other big sites have multiple datacenters in different regions and even continents.

Answer 4

Also check the details of the hosting plan for expenses.

Here in Hungary most providers give a bigger bandwith to the national net than to foreign countries. Let's say you buy a plan and you have a 100 Mb/s connection to the country, but only a 10 Mb/s connection to outside the country. This is because the internal bandwith is cheaper for them than the international bandwith.

So there is a benefit to locate the server to the country which uses the most.

Answer 5

Performance is one consideration, support is the other.

After a few different experiences we chose a provider in our time zone. Although most providers claim 24/7 support it is a very different deal in the middle of their business day than the middle of their night.

If you can, I say go local.

Answer 6

Another example: students in New Zealand universities must pay more to access "international" websites over domestic ones (University of Canterbury, for example).

Might not be relevant to you, but illustrates that location can be factor!

Answer 7

Another thing as mentioned is latency, but i think the thing to stress is if its a continuous streem of data, it may not be huge depending on teh data type, but if its a site that gets hit multiple times to complete a transaction of some sort (ajax app calling multiple web services for example) this can start to add up with high latency (ping)

Answer 8

One other consideration unrelated to performance is Search Engine Optimisation, some SEO people believe that hosting sites on servers in other geographic locations can have some affect on placement in results. I'm not sure how accurate this is but it may be something to look into if strong SEO placement is important to you.

In regards to performance then I have used both Mosso and Media Temple and have found access here in the UK to be very fast, I can't say it had any real impact to users browsing my sites.

That said though, I currently keep all my sites in UK based data centres.

Answer 9

Physical distance whilst a factor does not always mean that latency automatically goes up. Another factor is if is direct peering agreements with transit carriers based in other countries. For example you may find that the number of hops/ping time from UK -> US is favourable compared even to UK -> UK connectivity.

Answer 10

Yes, it definitely matters, as others have already said. You do actually lose eyeballs with every extra 100ms.

The corollary I'd add is that it really matters what datacenter your host is located in and who they're peering with -- the difference between a host with boxes at a major exchange point peered with several big telecoms vs. a host at a third-tier datacenter can be as big as U.S. vs. Europe.

Google doesn't just have boxes all over the place for geographical reasons, they're intentionally at almost every major Internet exchange point, and they're also peering with everybody so that their packets can route on whatever network is the fastest at any given moment.

You obviously can't do all that, but once you've got it narrowed to a few providers you can traceroute and look at hops and hoptimes at various times of day and figure out what's going to have the least latency to your users. (i.e., if all your users are in Germany, pick a spot in Frankfurt and traceroute to all the providers in your shortlist from there.)

Answer 11

Absolutely, take a look at http://www.speedtest.net/ and see the difference of hosting in Asia vs hosting in US

Answer 12

For a small site it is more than acceptable. I host my own sites and projects in the states while myself and a lot of the site users are in the UK.

Another factor to be aware of is the laws within the jurisdiction you are choosing as your host. A prime example of this is The Pirate Bay hosting in Sweden on account of their favourable attitude to copyrighted content.