Server Location: How Does it Affect the Website?

    website server

    Having a fast website is a must to ensure that your visitors are not turned away. Slow website affects the ranking on the search engine and also the attitude of the visitor to the site. Do you know that half of the visitors coming to the site expect that the site loads in less than 2-seconds?

    Importance of Hosting Server Location

    Even before starting any work on the website, the first decision that you have to take is to decide the location of the server. In fact, most believe that deciding on the server location is the primary step to build a successful site.

    Is it important? When the connections have become blazing fast, does the location of the server still has any significance? The answer to this question is yes. Even if the internet connection speed has gone up significantly, there are physical limitations. Data can only travel with a limited speed within the state, or country. 

    When the user accesses the website, it passes through the data centre of the host to the user across the passage of interconnected networks. To reach the computer, the data takes the fastest and the most efficient route in the network of the internet. While a lot of networks have started to use the fibre optic cables that can transfer the data with the speed of light, there is still some latency. For instance, the data is transferred with the speed of light; it would take 10milliseconds to travel 1000 kilometres. It means the end user will face a delay of this duration in accessing the website. It isn?t much of concern when it comes to delivering the best website experience. 

    How Local Webhosting Affects Website Speed?

    The location of the website hosting server directly affects the page load speed. So, if you have gone for website hosting in India, and the user is in India, the site will open faster for them. The reason is simple: the closer the users are to the website?s data centre, the faster the website will load for them. The term ?latency? that is used above is the time required by the server to receive and process a user request. When the server is located on another continent and the user in the other, the latency increases, and it negatively affects the page loading time. Here are some facts that you should know:

    • For any eCommerce site, a 1-second delay in loading the website decreases the conversion rate by seven percentage. 
    • If the website takes more than 3-seconds to load, most visitors coming to the site will abandon it. 
    • Those sites having videos are most-affected with latency. Nearly 80% of the visitors watching the video will stop watching them on the site if the website too long to load and buffer.
    • Google or any search engine, considers the page load time as a significant factor in ranking the website on their first page of results.
    • When the page load increases, the bounce rate of the site increases along with it. 

    So, if you are hosting a website in the country, it is better to go with a website hosting in India. In this way, the users coming to the site will be local, and the sever being hosted is also in India, so they will get a better fast website speed as compared to the situation if you had chosen server location in outside India. The apparent benefits of hosting in local servers are:

    • Low website latency
    • Fast page load

    The reason is not difficult to understand. For a user in India, the data packet to has to travel lesser distance and overcome few physical barriers. Further, the differences in the networks within the country are not much. However, if the user is in India and the hosting server is in the US, then a data packet has to travel a very long distance, it has to overcome numerous physical network barriers and also deal with heterogeneous networks. The result, there is latency due to which website performance is below par. 

    Conclusion,

    Local hosting is the best solution if you are expecting a more local traffic on the site. Thus, website hosting in India is best if you are creating a website for visitors in India.

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