Changing server location for a global targetted site

[Wardy]

Hi,

I am just in the process of purchasing a site from someone. The site has a global target audience (well global English speaking anyway).

The site is on a .info domain and is currently hosted in Germany.

Checking on SemRush it looks like 70% of traffic comes from English speaking countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK).

Now I need to move the hosting to one of my own when I change ownership of the site. Now does it overly matter where I choose my hosting as currently it is hosted in Germany (around 4% of visitors from Germany) but I want to do my best not to knock any rankings but I was thinking of moving it to a UK or US based host but still want to keep a general worldwide userbase. As the US accounts for the largest part of traffic (39%) would I be best choosing hosting based over in the US or does it not overly matter too much (I am in the UK so most hosting I use is UK based).

I have read a number of posts on server location but most seem to be for site which have a country specific target audience.

Thanks for your help!

[Theo-NL]

You should be looking at this from two different angles: (1) how would the hosting affect your rankings and (2) how will it affect the loading time of your website.

In terms of rankings, especially since you're considering to purchase a .info domain (side note: are you sure about this? Domains with .info isn't exactly considered a super premium TLD), I don't think it'll make much of a difference whether you'll be hosting in the USA or in Germany. Had it been a .de targeting Germany (much like the articles you're referencing) things had been different and I would've advised you to keep hosting the website in Germany.

Add the fact that it seems that fewer than 5% of your visitors are coming from Germany in the first place, I would say a move to an IP located in the US wouldn't hurt your number of visitors. Perhaps it might even increase your rankings in the USA marginally because Google now finds your IP hosted over there.

In terms of loading time you might want to consider CDN solutions to serve your website as quickly as possible to a global crowd.

[Wardy]

Thanks for the reply Theo

In my mind it made sence that I should be able to move host to a different country with not too many problems. Most of my other sites are UK based with a UK target audience I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be rocking the boat too much with a change of country and had it been hosted in a country where there was a decent level of traffic coming from then I'd have not considered thinking of moving it, the German hosting just threw me a curve ball I wanted to make sure I didn't ruin anything.

A fast US or UK server does sound like it would be OK to switch to. With regards to a CDN solution, there are no images or such on the site and the pages are very small file sizes so I'm unsure that it would make too much different to the load times, however a very good suggestion and once I get ownership of the site I'll check that that is still the case.

With regards to the .info domain, I know it's not ideal but the site I am buying is around 6 years old so I'm just going to have to live with it for this site, had it only been a year or 2 old I'd have given it a bit more thought.