HYGEN Blog

The Importance Of Server / Web Host Location

July 14th, 2010 | by admin |

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

Server usage by country 01/2010

Server usage by country 02/2010

Server usage by country 03/2010

Server usage by country 04/2010

Server usage by country 05/2010

Server usage by country 07/2010

From this real world example you can see the paramount importance of the geographic location of your servers. Localization is a must for any web site. The best way to serve your sites users is to have several servers in several countries globally which also can serve localized / internationalized content.

One other major factor to consider is network availability and bottlenecks – for example the great firewall of China, Internet filtering in Thailand and proxy servers globally. If your server is inside Thailand for example then all of your sites data won’t have to go through screening (and slow down) before reaching your Thai userbase.

Take your servers location, localization and internationalization seriously! Too many companies host their sites and servers in the US just because it can be cheaper and it’s a big mistake.