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4 reasons to host your site on US servers |
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..and 1 reason not to!
Many people automatically look for a web hosting service in their own country. It seems like a natural thing to do, and on the face of it makes sense. UK hosting companies often offer local rate calls to their support phone lines, and people feel more comfortable dealing with a company in their own country
So - why choose to have your website hosted on US servers?
1. Price.
The US is a much larger market than the UK, with many more large hosting companies in competition with each other. Economies of scale and increased competition has led to lower prices in the US. The favourable exchange rate is also great news for UK customers (although of course this may change). You can get a 5000 Mb account from Hostgator with 75Gb bandwidth, unlimited POP3 email accounts, PHP, MYSQL databases for only $9.95 month. At the current exchange rate thats less than £5.70/month! Whats more, with this account, you can host as many sites as you want. It even includes over 39 scripts that can be installed with one mouse click.
2. Speed.
Some people say that US servers are faster. Obviously the servers themselves are not any faster - the same servers from IBM, Dell, HP, Sun etc. are used.
Other factors influence the speed of the servers - the number of websites hosted on a particular server affects how much memory and processing time is dedicated to a particular website. This will vary from host to host and will be affected by the system resource usage of other sites hosted on the server (See virtual dedicated server article)
It could be that the bigger market in the US leads to more investment in servers, resulting in apparent speed benefits. For UK customers, connectivity to UK datacentres may be faster, but how many people notice? We connect every day to US based servers eg google, microsoft, etc without noticing slow connection.
3. Customer location.
If you have a UK website specifically targeting UK customers, then UK hosting may be more appropriate, however, if the content of your website is aimed at international/US customers, then it probably makes more sense to have the site hosted in the US (as well as have a .com domain rather than a .co.uk domain)
4. Support
Some people say that support could be difficult because of the time difference between the UK and the US, but that time difference could work in your favour - if you have problems in the afternoon/evening live support in the US will be available. In any case, most support by requires email anyway, and is usually available 24x7. US firms also tend to be more customer focused.
US web hosting comparison chart Check out the prices and features of top US web hosts.
And the reason not to?
A fairly large proportion of people in the UK, when they use Google UK, will choose the option "pages from the UK". How does Google know which pages are from the UK? There are two ways in which it can decide that a particular website is from the UK - if the website has .co.uk domain name, or if the server on which it is hosted is in the UK.
This means that if your website has a .co.uk domain name, you can host it in the US and it will still show up in searches of pages from UK. However, if you've decided on a .com domain name, and you are targeting UK customers, you must use a host based in the UK.
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It is a common misconception that if you use Windows in your business, you need Windows Hosting for your website.