What do you look for in a web host? Many people will have different expectations of their web host. Some are just looking for the cheapest solution, while others are more interested in speed and performance. The type of hosting company that you use will play a big impact on how well your website performs in the search engines.
Search engines such as Google, which is the most used search engine in the world, rank websites based on a large number of variables. These can include elements such as the content of the website, the page speed, how well optimized the site is, and hundreds of other ranking factors.
There are a number of these factors that are directly related to your web host, so it is important to know a little bit about them and how they can influence the search engines that index and rank your website, and the audience of your site and what their user experience is like.
If you operate a website for a local business, then you know that most of the traffic to your website will be within a specific radius of your location. If you are operating a dry cleaner in the city of Melbourne, then you can be confident that 90% or more of your website visitors are going to be locals looking for your business or service.
Even if you do not intentionally target location based keywords and search phrases on your website, Google is smart enough to know where your business is located, and will include it in results for people in your area who are searching for dry cleaning.
Now that you know the general location of your audience, it is a good idea to use a web hosting company who are located in the country of your audience. Operating a dry cleaner in Melbourne, your web host should be a company that is located in Australia. You can find a choice of some of the best hosts by doing a quick search on Google for something like best web hosting Australia, which should give you a great place to start looking for a host for your website.
There are a number of benefits of using a web host whose servers are located in the same country as your audience. By being located locally, and we mean locally in terms of country and not the city or neighborhood, then you are in a much better position concerning serving your audience with better page speed.
This basically means that the distance from a user’s computer or mobile device to the server where you host your website, will be a shorter distance, than if you hosted your website in the Netherlands. Though you may only be talking about milliseconds in terms of speed, it is still a great way to make sure that you are delivering your website to your visitors as quickly as possible.
Page and loading speeds of a website play a very important role, not just for Google and your rankings, but for the user experience of your visitors. If you visit a website and find that it is extremely slow to load and takes a lot longer than other websites you visit, the chances are that you will simply go back and find another site. This could potentially be losing you a huge chunk of business and revenue each and every day.
If your website is one that a person is visiting for the first time, you will want to make sure that you are providing them with the quickest loading times possible. One way that you can help achieve this is by having your website hosted on a server that is located in the same country and your target visitors. There are of course other methods you can do to get your pages loading just that little bit quicker, but things such as page optimization, and setting up a CDN (content delivery network) can take a lot of time and effort, and can also be expensive to do.
With localized web hosting in the country of your audience, your website is in a much better position to load up quicker for your visitors, than if it was in another country. However, you will need to make sure that your local web hosts are providing a quality service with fast and up to date servers and technology. You won’t see any benefit if you use a local web host who has been using servers and technology from the last century.
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