subject: Planning your website - the location strategy [print this page] Proir to selecting web hosting for your business the first question you MUST ask yourself is:
"Where are the majority of your target audience?"
Only when you know the answer can you decide on the main points which are:
Speed of connection - this relates to potential customers, and to your administer, for ftp and to manage the website via an admin area.
Latency is the time it takes to connect to a website, often noticed as a short delay (probably one of the better definitions of latency is here). This can vary dependant upon many factors (user connection type being the primary multiplier), however, in regards to a particular-location-to-host-your-website then we are concerned with the time it takes for your customers and locate the machine your website resides on. A simple network program can be used to measure this time, or round trip time as it is termed, this is "ping".
Here are some typical ping (speed) tests from London UK:
to UK hosted sites:
seiretto.co.uk (London UK datacentre) = around 2milliseconds (ms)
webmail.seiretto.com (Leeds UK datacentre) = around 10ms
to EU hosted sites:
nu.nl (Netherlands datacentre) = around 11ms
holland.com (Netherlands datacentre) = around 10ms
hotels.nl (Netherlands datacentre) = around 22ms
to USA hosted sites:
facebook.com (California USA datacentre) = around 84ms
twitter.com (Colorado USA datacentre) = around 166ms
youtube.com (California USA datacentre) = around 114ms
SEO search engine optimisation - you need Google to index your pages in the relevant country so ensuring your target audience see your products.
Google is now the main source of traffic for businesses around the World. you must ensure your website is listed within country's search results where your target customers reside.
Legal issues - data-protection.
Ensure you stay within the law - data protection laws dictate that you do not export your client data outside of the EU without specific agreement and knowledge of each customer.
Cost - dependant upon which country you host the cost of bandwidth can be restrictive.
So... the right location is paramount, take into account the location of your customers then this will help you decide where to host your website. The speed of connection is an important factor too.
For .uk websites requiring UK traffic (UK listings within Google), then hosting within Europe will be fine. But TLD (.com, .net, .org, etc...) domains that require a UK listings within Google, then you must host on UK servers. Customers based within the USA then you should host in the USA, what State, well thats another question...
