Why Do I Need to Think Where to Host My Website
A hosting country may be important for several reasons, such as:
- Saving money: The cost of maintaining a site can be much lower on a foreign server than on a domestic one (or vice versa).
- Making sites for a foreign audience: For example, you may live in an African country, but your site may be designed for an audience from the USA.
- From a legal point of view: When exploring which country has the best Internet privacy laws, pay attention to hosting options from Norway, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. However, you must research the laws before making your choice.
However, when searching for the best place to host your website, you should pay attention not only to geography but also to the technical side. At this stage, decide on your hosting type:
- Shared hosting: One server can account for a thousand sites, but all of these sites are usually not big and do not require much space or capacity. Shared hosting is the most common and cheapest option.
- Dedicated virtual server: This is an intermediate option between shared hosting and a dedicated server. Even though hosted websites share the same hardware, they are still allocated dedicated resources. Pricing is a bit higher.
- Dedicated server: In this case, you’ll have full control over your server. This option is suitable for large-scale projects that need high capacity. This option is the priciest.
Does the Hosting Country Really Have an Impact?
Some webmasters believe it is important to host their websites in the same region (country) as their target audience. In reality, server location doesn’t affect how fast Google bots crawl your website, as confirmed by a Google representative. The scanner works the same way around the world.
Indeed, the continuous operation of the site depends on the hosting, but not on a geographical basis. If the host has powerful servers, does not save on components, provides protection from cyber attacks, and quickly responds to all kinds of problems, then you can count on high uptime and successful website promotion.
How to Choose Hosting
Pay attention to the following characteristics when choosing hosting:
- Stability: This parameter determines the level of fail-safety and reliability. It is often evaluated by uptime. For example, if, after 1,000 hours of work, your site was unavailable for 20 hours, your uptime is 98%. This is good, but try to find a host with a rate of 99.5%.
- Speed: This depends on the server capacity (speed of processing requests) and the speed of the communication channel on its workload (number of visitors or requests) and volume. For instance, a site with 10 visitors loads quickly, but will slow down with 200 people checking it at the same time.
- Support: This is a very important feature because you cannot solve all your issues through the control panel. Technical support staff should be competent and easily accessible.
- Cost: All of the above characteristics directly affect the cost of hosting. High-capacity servers are expensive, but the high price itself doesn’t always equate to better quality, so look at all these characteristics together.
Check the reviews of other users for the top website hosting services. Moreover, if you haven’t created a website yet, check the best website builders that also provide hosting, such as Mobirise, Site123, and Wix.
One of the most popular blogging platforms today is WordPress. It is compatible with the majority of hostings. To choose the best WordPress hosting option in 2021, start with those that have a free trial period, so you can test their features before paying.
Which Country Should I Host My Website In?
Website loading speed and performance are influenced by many factors, such as server capacity and type as well as your chosen blogging platform. However, website hosting location isn’t one of these factors. Therefore, when choosing a hosting option, take account of technical aspects, such as how many people will be scrolling your website at the same time, how many adds-on your webpages will have, and so on.