UK Website Hosting
Ever wondered why the big websites have presence in all their major target markets around the world?
In this article we'll discuss the main factors influencing web hosting in geographic terms.
There have been many studies over the years regarding the importance of having fast website landing pages. When any visitor (user, bot, customer, etc.) enters your site from an external location (i.e. Google), the page they enter on is the landing page. This can be the front page or any other page within your site.
If your website is hosted in a geographically remote location from your main visitor base (i.e. customers), there is a fair chance that these visitors will experience a delay whilst waiting for the data (HTML, images, rich media, etc.) to transfer from your website to their computer.
For example, if your website is located on a server within the USA, but your target visitor base is within the UK, your website data will need to travel a long distance in order to reach the UK visitors. This can, and often does, lead to a delay in displaying your website information to the visitor. In this case UK hosting would almost certainly reduce response times.
Visitor wait times can have a significant impact on your traffic and any revenue generated by the website.
In 2006 Google found that moving from a page displaying 10 search results and loading in 0.4 of a second, to a 30 result page loading in 0.9 of a second, reduced revenue by 20%. Amazon also performed their own research and found that every 100 ms (millisecond) delay waiting for a page to display decreased revenue by 1%.
As home and business internet bandwidth capabilities increase around the world, we are finding that users are becoming increasingly less patient when waiting for a website to load. In 2006 research by Akamai Technologies discovered that only 33% of broadband internet users were willing to wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load.
Web users expect quick response times when browsing the internet, UK hosting with Farbyte will ensure this is what they get.
A major influencing factor for search engines like Google is your websites IP address. When performing country specific searches (i.e. users searching using google.co.uk, google.com, google.es) the search engine will score more points to websites hosted on IP addresses from the country in question than to a website hosted elsewhere.
For example, if you had two websites selling widgets. Website A is located on a UK server and website B is located on a server in the USA. A user searches on Google.co.uk for 'widgets'. All things being equal, Google will rank website A (UK website) higher in the ranking than site B.
If you are targeting UK visitors to your website you should consider UK web hosting. Farbyte provides feature rich, inexpensive UK hosting and we will be happy to take you onboard!
Host in the UK, holiday in Majorca :)
