Choosing The Right Data Center Location
Choosing the right data center location is an important decision. Because it is going to affect many other things about your website including your conversions and profitability.
A lot of people think choosing the right web hosting company as well enough.
It is important only the hosting company data centers are located in a place that has strategical importance for you. Most web hosting companies offer multiple locations for you to host your website.
As a rule of thumb, closer your server or data center location to the visitor, faster your pages will open for that visitor.
For instance, if you are targeting the US market, it would make much more sense to choose a New York, or San Fransisco as your data center location.
If you visit Pingdom site speed tool you will be able to measure how fast a website can be reached if it is accessed from a particular location in the world.
I have run a quick test on my site, my site can be accessed from a US location in less than a second which is pretty good. I host my website in a US data center my hosting company provides.
If your Webhosting provider doesn't offer you the data center location where your targeted visitors are, simply quit using that company.
People have very low patience when it comes to waiting web pages to open. We are living in an age, every second to access a website makes the difference.
Site owners trying everything to accelerate their site speed.
They try everything below
- Choose a fast hosting provider – (Digital Ocean provides solid performance.)
- Use a lightweight theme – (Themeforest have the best performing themes.)
- Benefit from a high-quality CDN service (Glowhost CDN is sharp)
You don't have the luxury to add additional time for data traveling before your page fully opens for your visitor.
Site Speed Affects Your SEO
If you test any page with the Pingdom tool choosing a different location each time, you will notice pages require different time span before they are fully opened.
I highly recommend verifying the performance of multiple pages on your website by using tools like Gtmetrix and Google Page Speed Insights.
Google cares user experience and pages that are loading slowly provide a poor user experience. Make sure your site can be accessed fast enough both from desktop and mobile devices.
Also, a slow website will likely have user bounce problems. When users cannot land on a page fast enough, they will push the back button to turn back to the search results. Bounces are also called zero-second visits that affect negatively your SEO rankings.
Hence when it comes to site speed, you should work to earn every millisecond you can.
Reduce the distance between servers and users
As previously stated, latency refers to the distance from point A to point B and is compressible. The only way to reduce latency is to position A and B points as close as possible. The points A and B represent the location of data center location.
To achieve this goal, you can use a CDN service (Content Delivery Network).
A CDN will help you to minimize the latency. The delay in between your request to load a page to the moment your page fully opens in the browser.
The number of factors influences the delay interval (Example: speed, SEO, etc.), many are unique to a web page.
Nevertheless, in all situations, the delay period will impact the physical distance between you and the hosting server of that website. A CDN's mission is to digitally shorten the physical distance, with the goal of improving site speed and performance.
How CDN eliminates the data traveling from your web hosting location?
To minimize the distance between visitors and your website server, a CDN stores a cached version of your content in multiple geographic Webhosting locations (i.e., presence points, or PoPs).
Each PoP contains a number of caching servers responsible for delivering information to visitors nearby.
CDN positions the content in many locations around the world, delivering better access to your users. For instance, when someone in Amsterdam accesses your US-hosted website, it's done through a local PoP in Netherland.
This helps pages to be served to the users much faster than having the visitor's requests, and your Webhosting responses to that request, data travels the full width of the Atlantic and back.
Conclusion
Choose a Webhosting data center location that is located in the closest distance to your target audience. If you are targeting international web traffic, use a CDN service.
Reduce the number of requests your pages make from external resources. Finally, keep your cash clean and invest in a WP performance plugin to improve your site performance.
