Web server locations for international seo

[iain]

We have a site that is currently hosted in the far east for the far eastern market.

We are having issues with the hosting co. so we are considering bringing the site back onto our servers in the UK. However, we don't obviously want to damage too much the bit of uplift we get from local hosting.

What is our best approach? Is it ok  just to have the site in the UK even though its aimed at the Far East? Or is the use of a proxy server good? Or should we look for other local hosts?

Any help very gratefully received.

Iain

[irvingw]

Hosting location is no longer important for SEO, go with a company that is reputable, has 99.9% uptime and is fast, maybe a VPS. Make sure there is no downtime when doing the switchover. Just because a server is in closer proximity to your users doesn't mean it's going to be faster. It's all about performance and reliability, and a hosting company with good support is important too.

[iain]

Thanks for the speedy response. I was hoping that was the answer. We have a VPS in the UK so I'll go for that.

But it does lead me to a follow on question. How do you account for regional variants in search results?

I understand that each variant of a search engine can use a slightly different algorithm and a local site is more likely to have local links but there does seem still to be a greater disparity of results than these things would suggest.

Many thanks,

Iain