Geolocation of Your Server Matters To Your Website Visitors

For all the hoopla about the Internet breaking down physical trade barriers and allowing businesses to enter foreign markets without having to worry about borders, when it comes to e-commerce and other online activities, hosting a website in a local server has many advantages.

The World Wide Web may be the ultimate global village in the sense that information can travel with few restrictions. A web designer in Canada, for example, can develop a website registered with a top-level country domain like .fr for France and host it in the United States. That developer can go further with the website and ensure that it is adequate to francophone audiences by featuring content in the French language that also appeals to French sensibilities. So far, so good, but, the fact that the site is hosted across the Atlantic will present two issues.

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Load Times

The first thing to consider in our example above is the load time. By virtue of the website being hosted in the U.S., a visitor located in Bordeaux will experience a slower load time than a visitor in Dallas. The difference may be negligible, less than a second, but once the website becomes popular and attracts multiple visitors simultaneously, the load times may become longer as higher bandwidth requirements are imposed on the foreign server.

Geolocation by Internet Protocol (IP) Addressing and Search Engines

Our example of the French-facing website being hosted in Dallas brings up the issue of geolocation and location-aware services. The Internet has turned many of us into amateur cartographers; to wit: the popularity of GPS-enabled smartphones and the countless mapping applications.

Internet search giant Google is very interested in delivering a personalized search experience, and to that extent it emphasizes geolocation. Our website visitor in Bordeaux will almost invariably point his browser to google.fr when he or she wishes to look something up. Our web developer in Canada knows a couple of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices, and thus the country domain is already .fr. This will certainly increase the Google PageRank of the website, but the fact that is hosted in Dallas will move it a bit down the search results when compared to other sites hosted in France, or even Europe.

The website in Dallas may have content that is very relevant to the visitor in Bordeaux, but since the Google PageRank algorithm takes into consideration IP addressing and location, that website will not rank as high as the French websites. This is not the case for Yahoo, but location is increasingly becoming a significant factor for Bing Search.

Is Going Local Better?

Having a local domain and presence in a target country is invaluable for a few reasons. Faster load times and higher PageRank should be significantly enough, but there’s also the specific issue of e-commerce. Payment processing systems, courier delivery solutions, and shopping cart applications are often country-specific for business and security reasons. These reasons make it essential for webmasters to find web hosting providers that offer truly local server presence.

The Same Principle Applies to Targeting Your Market

Let’s say that you are based on some offshore island with little economic advantage; if you know that your market has bigger potential in value abroad or in the U.S., then it wouldn’t matter where you are webmastering your content from. It would be beneficial to host your website in your target audience’s region