How Web Hosting Data Center Location Impacts Your Website Speed

Everyone loves to browse through a fast website, where webpages load quickly and images appear in a fast manner. With the advent of high-speed internet connections, having a slow website is literally a crime today. Slow website speed not only affects your conversion rate but also your search engine rankings and sales as well. Choosing quality hosting, like HostGator or Bluehost is recommended for optimum performance.

While there are many things that contribute to the slowness of your website, hosting your website in a data center that is very far from your location could be one of them. In this article, we’ll explore how web hosting data center location impacts your website speed. For more info about hosting, we recommend checking Easy Hosting Guide.

How Server Location Will Impact Your Website Speed

In general, internet data gets transferred from one location to another through a network of cables. Even though the signals are pretty quick, the long distance that the electronic pulses need to travel will impact the time taken to reach the intended destination. This is often referred to as latency, where data needs to travel from point X to point Y.

For example, if you are running a website that mainly caters to pet lovers in London, hosting your website on a server located in the US will require time for the data to travel from there to people browsing your site in London.

Every request a website visitor sends needs to travel from the UK to the US and vice versa. Hence, you can imagine the amount of time this will take if your website is not static and makes a lot of requests to the server. This is why many website owners make use of a CDN to deliver content from servers distributed geographically.

For your pet lovers website, the CDN will check for servers located close to London and deliver content from those servers. Hence, you can see that content loads much quicker than from normal servers.

How Localized Web Hosting Will Improve Speed

The speed of your website is directly proportional to the location of your server. The farther your server, the slower your website, and the closer the server is to the visitors, the faster your site loads.

Latency or the time taken to process a request sent to a server and deliver the response can affect the website speed. Hence, more people go for localized web hosting than servers located in other continents. Even though the servers are fully equipped, if they are far, they will certainly slow down your site.

Another recommendation is to choose hosting that gives us the option to use multiple data centers. For instance, SiteGround hosting lets us choose from around 6-7 locations in different continents before signing up. This number is 23 with Kinsta, which has multiple data centers all around the world. However, SiteGround is a more recommended web hosting company than Kinsta due to its lower prices. Check out this SiteGround review from Inlinehostblogger, which explains this aspect further.

Studies reveal that:

• Even a 1-2 second delay could lead to a decrease in conversion rates of up to 7%.
• A delay of more than 3 seconds will lead to almost 35-40% of your website visitors abandoning your website.
• Even a 2.2-second increase in your website load speed will increase your conversion rates up to 15%.
• Amazon said that a one-second delay in page load speed could cost it around $1.6 billion in sales.
• Google analysts believe that even a half-a-second slowdown will result in losing 8 million google searches a day. This literally means that the ad views could be much lesser, leading to the loss.

How to Fix Server Latency Problems

If you are facing latency issues, then the primary issue is the website server location. One fix is to look for a server that is closer to your location. Another solution could be opting for Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB). GSLB refers to managing website traffic by delivering content from servers closer to the sources of the requests.

GSLB solution providers have a network of servers located in various locations across the world. Subscribing to the service enables you to minimize latency and increase website speed to a great extent.

GSLB allows websites to redirect their traffic to servers closer to their location, thereby reducing the response time and increasing page load speed.

Similar to GSLB, the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) services will also play a huge role in reducing latency. It helps with caching your data on several servers in multiple locations across the world.

Choosing the Right Location to Host From

While not many look into the prospect of hosting on a server closer to their location, people who understand latency issues look for the right location to host their website from. Hence, if you are targeting mainly traffic from the US, then it is essential to choose a data center based inside the US.

But if your audience is mainly from Asia, then the better option is to choose Singapore as your hosting location. Since Singapore is considered to be a major hub for website routing and traffic it being your hosting location will help a great deal with your website loading speed.

Once you have determined your website audience and target region, you need to look for hosts in that region offering good hosting plans. Most popular hosting services have data centers in various locations for this reason alone.

Final Thoughts

To put it in a nutshell, website server location plays a huge factor in determining your webpage load speed. It not only affects the speed but also creates a huge impact in many areas, including your conversion rates, sales, and revenue.

The speed of your website is directly related to the distance of the website server location. Hence, opt for a server that is close to your location, or choose a service like a CDN to take care of your latency issues.

Either way, speed is an important factor in determining the success of your website and building trust and reliability amongst your website visitors. Read the SiteGround review for the best hosting plans for your website.

I hope the article above has provided you with a rough idea of how web hosting data center location impacts your website speed.