The Importance Of Server / Web Host Location

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

You may have heard of the importance of the geographical location of your servers when running websites. What you may not realize is just how important it is, especially to Google.

Firstly you need your servers to be geographically close to your target audience so the load times will be faster because packets of data won’t have to travel so far and can avoid more bottlenecks in the network. So the closer the server to the user, the better the speed and service.

Secondly, search engines take the geographical location of your servers / web hosts into account when ranking your sites. If your site is hosted in the US then you will get more US traffic and less from the rest of the world, likewise if it’s hosted in Japan then you can expect more Japanese traffic and less from elsewhere.

To illustrate the importance of server location check out these images. They clearly show a shift in traffic sources when the web server moved countries from Malaysia to the UK…

Server usage by country 12/2009

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