Is it better to have hosting that specializes in performance or have the host closer to you physically?
-
I am looking to change to a new hosting company.
I am debating between taking a company that specializes in Wordpress and performance but is situated far from my users or a local company that might not be as good from a performance/speed point of view.
Which do you think I should go with?
My users are near Europe and the Wordpress hosting that I am considering is in the US.
-
Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.
-
Hi Jill,
I'll always take speed and having a server in another country over having a server local and not having any speed advantages. Mostly, but this is just my take on this, because the factor on how a local server improves your ranking is so small you probably will never see a result on this in your rankings or your organic search traffic. This probably will be the case if you improve for speed, it will decrease the load time for your users hopefully and also decrease the time it takes for Google to download your pages.
Besides this, there are other functionalities to make sure Google is right about the country your site is targeting. Think about: href lang tags, more local signals as in links or company profiles and ofcourse geotargeting within Google Webmaster Tools.
Would absolutely love to hear the arguments for somebody disagreeing on this!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Control indexed content on Wordpress hosted blog...
I have a client with a blog setup on their domain (example: blog.clientwebsite.com) and even though it loads at that subdomain it's actually a Wordpress-hosted blog. If I attempt to add a plugin like Yoast SEO, I get the attached error message. Their technical team says this is a brick wall for them and they don't want to change how the blog is hosted. So my question is... on a subdomain blog like this... if I can't control what is in the sitemap with a plugin and can't manually add a sitemap because the content is being pulled from a Wordpress-hosted install, what can I do to control what is in the index? I can't add an SEO plugin... I can't add a custom sitemap... I can't add a robots.txt file... The blog is setup with domain mapping so the content isn't actually there. What can I do to avoid tags, categories, author pages, archive pages and other useless content ending up in the search engines? 7Zo93b2.png
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Devaluing certain content to push better content forward
Hi all, I'm new to Moz, but hoping to learn a lot from it in hopes of growing my business. I have a pretty specific question and hope to get some feedback on how to proceed with some changes to my website. First off, I'm a landscape and travel photographer. My website is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com - you can see that the navigation quickly spreads out to different photo galleries based on location. So if a user was looking for photos from California, they would find galleries for Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, the Redwoods and San Francisco. At this point, there are probably 600-800 photos on my website. At last half of these are either older or just not quite up to par with the quality I'm starting to feel like I should produce. I've been contemplating dumbing down the galleries, and not having it break down so far. So instead of four sub-galleries of California, there would just be one California gallery. In some cases, where there are lots of good images in a location, I would probably keep the sub-galleries, but only if there were dozens of images to work with. In the description of each photo, the exact location is already mentioned, so I'm not sure there's a huge need for these sub-galleries except where there's still tons of good photos to work with. I've been contemplating building a sort of search archive. Where the best of my photos would live in the main galleries, and if a user didn't find what they were looking for, they could go and search the archives for older photos. That way they're still around for licensing purposes, etc. while the best of the best are pushed to the front for those buying fine art prints, etc. These pages for these search archives would probably need to be de-valued somehow, so that the main galleries would be more important SEO-wise. So for the California galleries, four sub-galleries of perhaps 10 images each would become one main California gallery with perhaps 15 images. The other 25 images would be thrown in the search archive and could be searched by keyword. The question I have - does this sound like a good plan, or will I really be killing my site when it comes to SEO by making such a large change? My end goal would be to push my better content to the front, while scaling back a lot of the excess. Hopefully I explained this question well. If not, I can try to elaborate further! Thanks, Mickey
Technical SEO | | msphotography0 -
Hosting set up in different country
Hi Guy's, I was wondering if it matters if your hosting servers is set on a different country than where you're website is targeting (.de (germany) website and the server is in france) Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Geographic location of hosting affect SEO
Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you
Technical SEO | | summer3000 -
Need better solution for 301s with Jekyll/S3 Site
Hey Mozzers, So, this isn't the first time that I've come to the community with questions regarding my new site. Although running a site using static HTML-generated pages has been fantastic in the first few weeks as far as load times, it's been a nightmare in terms of a few other SEO-related concerns, namely redirects. In the Q&A post above, Mat Shepherd pointed out a solution for adding 301s to an Amazon Webservices site using their "Redirection Rules" field on the "Configure Bucket for Website Hosting" page. However, I discovered soon after that I was limited to only 50 redirects using this method. Obviously, all things considered, this will not be enough. At this point, I'm basically out of ideas. If anyone else out there has a website with a similar setup, (Jekyll platform hosted on Amazon S3,) that has overcome this problem with redirects, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance, everyone
Technical SEO | | danny.wood0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
I grabbed a better domain name. What next?
I have been trying to rank well for the key word "National Currency" forever and can't seem to make it into the top ten. I would really like to have the URL NationalCurrency but it's taken and can't be bought. My url is nationalcurrencyvalues. After reading the forums and various other SEO advice it occurred to me that National-Currency is as good or better than NationalCurrency for that keyword because it's seen as two words. (right) So, I grabbed that domain name. Now, my question... is there some way to make use of the National-Currency domain name without building an entirely new site? I don't think I want transfer all of my content from nationalcurrencyvalues. Would there be any benefit to my nationalcurrencyvalues if I set up 303's on National-Currency?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Best hosting
We understand that some companies offering class c ips can still be fingerprinted.. Is there any hosting site that does offer class c ips that prevents that? Or is the best bet using privacy on all domains and then using multiple hosting companies, checking the ips they offer as you go? If that is the case, are there any recommendations for the best host companies that offer the least fingerprinting?
Technical SEO | | Stevej240