When it comes to web hosting most webmasters are looking at the space that is give, the monthly bandwidth, number of mail accounts, etc. This is why hosting companies adapted and they are given unlimited everything for shared accounts too.

Well, this doesn’t mean that your site can consume all server resources. When you reach a certain level they will tell you to upgrade or leave. All hosting companies give you “same” resources for as low as they can, but there is a very important aspect that is overlooked by most webmasters: the location.

 

Why is location so important?

You can have a server with a great processor, that has an uptime of 100%, but it is located in United States, while the most of your visitors are located in UK or Germany. Even if it loaded in 0.1 seconds by a computer in US, this does not mean anything to you if your users are outside US. This means that your visitors from Europe can wait several seconds until the website is loaded, because it is very far. Even if you have a great connection speed, the long distance will increase the response time considerably and your website will be loaded slowly and some visitors can consider that it will probably never load.

Web Hosting Location effect in traffic.

It is well known that most google users check several websites from a search result. They go to the first one, se what’s there, then hit back, open another, etc. If it will take more than few seconds for the webpage to load, they press back and they visit another website. This behavior will also impact the google rankinks, since it is well known that if people often press back after they visited your site from search engine it is a sign that your content is irelevant to that search term, determining google to lower the ranking.

Web Hosting Location effect on Google rankings.

First of all, last year google improved the algorithm to math the site loading speed. If your page loads very slow then your google ranking will be negatively impacted. The website is actually loading fast, but only for us traffic, and you target is google.co.uk instead of google.us and google.com. So if the page is loading slow then you will get lower rankings.

Web hosting Location effect on sales.

If a page loads slow, then people will have a hard time getting trough the whole sales funnel, finally affecting your conversion rate. Also, if a website is loading slowly, then it is a sign of un-professionalism and they will think twice before buying the product. On the other hand, if the website loads lightning fast they will see this as a sign of high quality services. It is a known fact that people assume that if you are doing well in an area, then there is a great change that you are doing well in all areas.