Hosting in a foreign country!

[GaryVictory]

If a client is based in New York, and looks to target customers is New York. Is it wise to have your hosting server located in another country? Will this affect being searched locally? I have heard this can affect local search optimisation?

[TimKelsey]

Hi Gary,

You can find a really good answer to this here - http://moz.com/community/q/can-geographic-location-of-web-server-affect-in-seo#reply_66282

In short, it is best to have your server in the location that you're targeting, but it won't have a huge impact. I would imagine that as the years have gone by, server location has become an even smaller factor. Tons of websites use CDNs and host internationally and Google is smart enough to figure out the location that they're targeting. You can (and should) set your target location in Google Webmaster Tools as well.

Hope this helps.

Tim

[FedeEinhorn]

ONLY in the terms of speed. If you are targeting New Yorkers, you probably want to serve them as fast as possible. An offshore server will deliver slower that a server in Virginia (Amazon AWS) for example.

Using a CDN can probably eliminate that issue as almost ALL CDN providers have multiple servers across the US, still the dynamic content will be loaded from the main server, but that is usually the smallest amount of data (while CSS and JS files are usually what slows down loading and rendering).

Hope that helps!

[GaryVictory]

Thank you both for your help and feedback. Have a great weekend!

Gary