Setting up a website is very much like setting up an office—it is all about location! If you’re a product- or service-oriented business, it would be very advantageous to set up shop or office somewhere accessible and with good traffic. You want to locate somewhere convenient both for you and your clients so it does not take too much time for them to pay you a visit. It is also best to locate at a place where new and prospective clients who are still not aware of your existence can easily stumble upon your shop or office. In the same light, it doesn’t take you much to travel to and from your office.

Setting up a website is the same. Yes, granted that you need an Internet domain name that’s easy to remember and easy to find, this is not the end-all of things. You also need to select your web hosting provider according to location. It is preferred to host in a country where your intended clientele is most likely to be. This will be very much beneficial both for you and your clients because of the following: speed, searchability, and accessibility. So if majority of your clients are in a particular country or location, then it would pay for you to host there or somewhere near.

Speed: Dialup Internet access is on its way to extinction, at least for about 40% of the world’s Internet-using population. This means the WWW is no longer the “world wide wait,” but rather webpages now load up in a jiffy. This means websites also have to travel faster so that the reader won’t have to wait long for a page to load up. Generally, the closer the web hosting provider to a reader is, the faster the data can travel from the web server to his computer. This is because the access from one point to the other is more direct than, say, if the web server were located at the other side of the world.

Searchability: Search engine optimization has been very popular in the recent years since search engines started using automated procedures to compute site relevance and popularity rankings, instead of human submissions. Google PageRank, for instance, is a combination of a lot of things, including the magnitude and authority of internal links, and the frequent updating of content, among others. However, one major factor in ranking pages is also the geographic location of a website. Search engines give higher ranks to pages hosted in a certain country for queries specific to that country. So if your domain is a generic top-level domain (i.e. not a country-specific domain), the search engines’ next way to determine the location of your website is through the physical location of the web server, which is tracked by I.P. address.

Accessibility: What’s worse than having your website inaccessible because the web server has bogged down? This is another major concern of business owners who have e-commerce sites set up. And here, it would be advantageous if your web hosting provider is also accessible to you physically, so getting in touch with them for help would be easy.

You should, indeed, try to choose your web hosting provider as you would choose office space. Before you move in, consider the above three reasons why it is better to host locally.