SEO rankings play an important role in your website’s performance and the volume of traffic that it witnesses. While the content, the keyword distribution, and the backlinks of your site are important for getting a good search engine ranking, the speed and the response time also play a key role. Now, what determines the loading time of your website? It is the type of hosting service you are using and the location of the server on which your website is being hosted. Let us find out more about this.

Hosting Server Location

The location of the server of your web and domain hosting service provider has a significant impact on the overall performance of your website and especially its page loading times. So, besides comparing the domain and hosting price of different service providers do check the physical location of their data centres. 

Hosting companies can provide their services through data centres spread across the globe, but the closer the server is to your target audience, the better it is. Say, if you are a business located in India, prefer a domain hosting service company whose data centre is located in India and not any other country. This is important if you are looking for good speed and performance for your website.

Web Hosting and Server Location

To understand the importance of data centre location we need to understand a few things:

• Latency is Not Liked by Users– When an internet user clicks on your website, the data is passed from the data centre to the user’s computer or mobile through network paths. The aim is to transfer the data within the shortest possible time and provide you instant access to it.  But if your hosting provider’s server is located outside India, it will take more time to pass the information resulting in delayed data transfer and loading of web pages. In contrast, if the server is located in India, close to your target customers, the data transfer time will be less and the users will get to see your web pages quickly. Research has shown that users tend to abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load.
• Slow Speed Leads to Higher Bounce Rates– Slow speed leads users to abandon your site thereby boosting the bounce rates or the single-page sessions. In contrast, if your website loads quickly, the user gets time to visit various pages and spend a greater time to check out the information available on it.
• Better Crawling by Search Engines– If your site loads faster, it can be crawled easily by the search engines to have access to the updated content or any changes made. Having a local server ensures that your website loads faster and any changes made in it are quickly visible to the search engines as well as users.
  

But what happens if your target customers are not only in India but spread across different countries? This is where CDN or Content Delivery Network comes in. A CDN is a group of servers that store a cached version of your website in different locations across the world and responds from the location that is closest to the user’s location. So, while looking for a web hosting plan in India and comparing domain and hosting prices, check for the inclusion of a CDN if you have customers outside India too.