Location is one of the essential components that make up any hosting offer. Choosing the right location can contribute to various aspects of your website’s optimal operation. Today we want to analyze exactly in which ways, and how the geospatial data can be helpful in this task.
The importance of server location
When you browse the internet, you might have always had the impression that the websites you visualize pop up just from nowhere. That they are contained somewhere within the vast network of cables but without a concrete localization, with no option to answer exactly where a website is located. However, the case is just the opposite: every website can be traced back to a particular server upon which it is hosted, and every server is housed at a particular data center which is in turn located at some particular place. And the choice of this place is not occasional.
A website is located at a physical place and it has to cover a physical distance which requires a physical amount of time. The more distance, the more time. This time interval is referred to as latency and what we do when we organize our server infrastructure is to minimize the latency for everybody who is likely to access our website. In other words, make so that the server is as close as possible to all parts of your target audience.
Benefits of the right location
Benefits of the right location are presented by:
- Customer contentment: Nothing is as annoying as a page that loads hundreds of years. When encountering such a website, you are likely to leave the website for good and look for another one. On the contrary, a site that loads smoothly and in no time is likely to leave a very positive impression if the rest of the aspects are fine. The more your visitors are satisfied after visiting your website, the more the probability that they stick, which results in more customers and more revenues.
- SEO rankings: The other and less direct side of your website’s promotions relies heavily on the former more direct aspect. Indeed, page load speed is one of the criteria that are posed by search engines. The better page load speed you can offer, the better chances you have. Another point why location positively contributes to your site’s search engine optimization is that search engines also have the inclination to show in the first place the sites that are hosted physically closer to a particular visitor. Since it’s easier to get various services as long as their head office is located not far from you, the logic behind this is also pretty clear.
Choosing the proper location
To choose the proper location you have to make up your mind about where your target audience is to be. If your products target a particular country, then you just have to opt for the location that is directly in that country or in the next closest country to this region.
If you are not sure so far, in which country your target audience is to be located, you should apply a series of approaches and market research to figure out where your services will be most in demand. In this case, you’ll require the geospatial data related to the search request and choose your location based on it. If your target audience cannot be limited to a single country or a particular dense geographical region, what can help you is a Content Distribution Network
CDN
Content Distribution (and Delivery) Network abbreviated as CDN is an auxiliary service related to hosting that makes your website accessible to a more geographically distributed audience. A CDN is a network of interconnected servers that help deliver content to more remote visitors of your website omitting latency. This is achieved through caching. Some parts or just the whole content of your website is cached that is stored on the servers of the CDN, so the users can view it with much less latency. Besides that, a CDN gives a range of additional benefits, like reducing the load on your main server and optimizing the bandwidth consumption.
Gather the geospatial data about where your target audiences are supposed to be and choose a CDN service that can cover it at best.
There are many CDN offers available, some are connected to other services, and some offer just pure CDN. Keep in mind what exactly you want and how much you can afford to pay since offers can vary a lot in terms of services provided and price.
Conclusion
Geospatial data can provide valuable hints on what location will be the best one for your main servers as well as on how to organize your CDN infrastructure. Location is an aspect not to be neglected during the choice of a web hosting solution, so pay close attention to it. We hope that the information provided was helpful, thank you for your time!
James is the head of marketing at Tamoco
