Hosting in the US for an Australian website

[MarketingResults]

Hi,

I was wondering whether it's still important for SEO to host a website in the same country as you're targetting.

We host a fair few Australian sites and we're looking for a new webhost at the moment. Should we only consider hosting on Australian servers or is it worth looking at servers elsewhere?

One of the main reasons we're thinking about US hosting is that we can get a machine that is 3x more powerful than we can get in Australia for the price. This performance increase should go some way to minimizing the effect of the latency increase.

Thanks,

Nick

[john4math]

You should be able to get around this with geotargeting.  You can set indicators for Google and other search engines that your site is for that country.  I don't think where you host the site is as important as having good machines and indicating to the search engines what country and language your site is for.

Geotargeting:

• Google
• Bing (& other search engines)

[Francisco_Meza]

Take a look at Rackspace Cloud (Multiple regional (US and UK) service endpoints) & Amazon Cloud. I use both. You won't have a problem with either one. I think Amazon cloud has a Europe, Japan, US and Canada endpoint.

[JamesNorquay]

Hi,

I work in SEO for the Australian market.

My advice is if you host e-commerce websites then I would advise to host the website in Australia, you want speed you want to host it where the user base is.

Furthermore if you are looking for hosting deals many Australian companies now offer good rates, I use Ventra IP I am quite happy with them.

Also in regards to power of .com.au, it is far better then using a geo targeted .com in my experience.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards,

James.