Why does server location matter?

Your server's location might affect website speed, SEO, and legal compliance.

17:20 29 December 2023

Why does website hosting server location matter? The solution is the complex relationship between server location, website performance, and user experience. Your server's location might affect website speed, SEO, and legal compliance. 

In the digital world, rapid page loading is crucial. This article will examine the intriguing relationship between server locations, user expectations, and how to make your website successful online.

What is the hosting server?

Web servers' "physical location" is the data center's exact coordinates. Data centers may be worldwide. Consider your target demographic's internet habits before choosing a web host.

Imagine your company's headquarters in Sweden. Instead, your best customers live in the US. It may be best to use servers near your intended audience. Site availability and performance depend on server location.

When users click on your website, data goes across networks between your data center and their PC. Finding the quickest or least-delayed network channels to convey data is the goal.

Let's discover your server's location

Knowing what to search for makes finding your server easy. Two methods may locate your server:

Using Windows Ping: For instance, by using a program for testing website performance such as Pingdom or GTmetrix.

Step 1: Using Ping Command in Windows

• Press the Enter key once you've entered ping- an example.com into the command line or terminal on a Mac or Windows computer.
• You may expect the response to provide details on the server you ping. The server's hostname, IP address, and country code will be part of this data.

Step 2: You can Use Website Speed Test Tools

Website speed test tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix now include server information in their findings, so it's easy to find out where your hosting is located. This has been happening for a while now. All you have to do is visit one of these programs; the data in their reports is the same.

Why Does Server Location Matter?

There are hundreds of data centers spread out around the globe, and the server that hosts your website might be physically situated in any of them. How your server provider handles this matter is entirely up to them.

For a website to load, a signal must travel from your computer to a server and then to the destination. It will take more time for the connection to take place if the server is situated at a big distance.

Website load speed and, by extension, SEO may be significantly affected by the physical location of your host server.

Researchers found that over half of all internet users (47 %) expect web pages to load in two seconds or less. This percentage is much greater when including mobile users, who constitute over 50% of Google's user base. This is not surprising in light of people's short attention spans in the modern world.

According to Google, one of the main indicators their algorithm utilizes to rank sites is the speed at which a page loads. Because of this, search engine optimization (SEO) suffers, conversion rates drop, and your company's earning potential plummets when visitors leave your site before it fully loads.

The server's location affects its search engine optimization ranks

To measure how long a user spends on your website after clicking on a link from a SERP, we use the term "dwell time." A higher "dwell time" indicates that users spend more time on your site. On the other hand, "bounce rate" measures the percentage of users who visit one page on your site before either leaving or going to another page. The search engines use both of these factors heavily when making their rankings.

Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmasters) allows you, the website owner, to choose a target country. Google and similar search engines make this possible. But, because Google already links these national TLDs, you won't have the option to specify your target nation if you register your domain name with a country top-level domain (e.g., ".de" for Germany).

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who decides not to name a specific country as their target. If this happens, Google will look at all the details of its rivals' websites and guess where your server may be physically located based on these factors:

• Your server's Internet Protocol (IP) address
• Information retrieved from your website, including user-accessible content snippets and contact details
• Backlinks to your website

When designing a website with global accessibility, choosing a particular server location is not necessarily necessary. Use a content delivery network (CDN) to make websites load faster.

Your server location impacts legal compliance

When it comes to following the law, the location of your server is important. You may face legal issues if your website's servers are in a different nation than your hosting provider's.

Website operators should be aware that data protection laws vary by country. Regulations like Europe's GDPR demonstrate this. Data storage on foreign servers is typically regulated inconsistently. Healthcare firms may be prohibited from storing sensitive patient data on hosting servers in some countries.

Assume your hosting server is in Canada. Read the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to learn how Canada protects personal information. Covering all bases requires considerable study.

Distribution of Content

Content distribution and server placement are linked. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) or strategically deploying servers in several places is essential for global websites. This strategy makes providing content from the closest server to consumers easier. It also improves website performance, reduces latency, and speeds up loading times for all visitors, regardless of location.

How Search Engines See Server Locations?

Search engines like Google employ many factors to establish a website's ranking. For example, Google's search engines analyze various factors, including the source's knowledge, the geography, the settings, and the results' relevance and usability.

Matt Cutts, who was once an expert in Google Search Quality, was asked if the physical location of the hosting server affects search engine rankings. "We make every effort to provide the most pertinent results to each user living in each country." He continued by saying that the server's location is another factor to consider when determining the IP address.

On the other hand, geo-targeting—a more global strategy for SEO—is being increasingly used by major search engines like Google and Bing. Businesses with servers in several countries may choose a specific target country using webmaster tools.

In the absence of a specified target country, the search engine will use other criteria, such as the server's content, backlinks, and IP address.

Rather than using server location, Google is now using ccTLD, which stands for country code top-level domain. Search results on Google are guided by relevance. Consequently, you should expect a higher rating if your website caters to a certain geographic area for your visitors. However, server location significantly impacts website speed and response times.

Using a CDN for faster and closer content delivery

The abbreviation "CDN" stands for "content delivery network," describing a group of servers located worldwide. This is achieved by reducing the actual distance between the user and the server, which aids in the reduction of latency. A content delivery network (CDN) stores a copy of your website's content in a cache somewhere around the globe.

Without a CDN, every user request would have to be handled by the main servers individually. The data transmission is slow since the servers are swamped with queries.

Requests made by users near their current location are responded to by the content delivery network (CDN). Some of the content users see when they click on your website comes from the server in your content delivery network (CDN) that is physically nearest to them. The rest comes straight from your website's hosting server.

A content delivery network (CDN) may help your website's pages load faster. Content delivery networks (CDNs) may also help alleviate server stress and improve response times, which is especially useful if your customer base is global.

What Is Network Latency & TTFB?

There are many aspects to consider before placing a server. Issues include network delay and first-hand time. 

What Is Network Latency?

Network latency is a user's time to connect to a server, process their request, and get data. The following variables may impact network latency:

• Round trips: Scripts, HTML, and other object requests go from the user's browser to your web server. We call this a round trip. Round trip time is affected by user-web server distance and intermediate node count.
• Server performance:A server's performance depends on its speed, RAM, hardware, and latency.

Even tiny latency fluctuations affect page load time and user experience. E-commerce websites must consider low latency since it might hurt user experience and performance. 

Measuring Latency with TTFB

The Time to First Byte (TTFB) is when a website loads in the user's browser following a first request. Three key reasons may impact TTFB:

• Time from server to network and processing of your request.
• Server processing and response time.

After receiving the response, the web browser obtains the complete duration between occurrences.

Two techniques to calculate TTFB:

• Actual TTFB:The real-time it takes a web browser to get a server's first byte of data is TTFB. TTFB may depend on network speed and connection. 
• Perceived TTFB: The term "perceived time to first load" (TTFB) defines how long a website takes to load for a user. This critical SEO and user experience measure is based on HTML file parsing time.

How to Reduce Latency?

A wide range of possible activities at different locations along the network might increase the latency. For instance, you should check that no one on your network is using all the bandwidth or downloading excessive amounts of data, which might raise your latency.

The apps' performance should also be checked to ensure no programs are acting strangely, causing the network to slow down.

Creating groups of endpoints that communicate with one other often is another subnetting technique. Traffic shaping and bandwidth allocation algorithms are two more ways to reduce network latency.

Choosing the Best Location for your server

• Pinpoint Your Audience: Map Out The Key Areas Where Your Ideal Customers Congregate. Put your server in a data center in a big European city like Frankfurt or Amsterdam; for example, if most of your site users are from Europe.
• Use CDNs for Better Delivery: Distributing your website's content to several server locations throughout the globe is possible with the help of CDNs. Operate an international e-commerce website. A content delivery network (CDN) may help material load quicker for consumers in all regions by distributing it from US, Asia, and Europe servers. The TryRDP has multiple datacenters in more then 15+ countries.
• Assess Data Center value: Try to locate reliable data centers that are well-connected and have a solid infrastructure. This is the first stage of determining the data center's quality. You can ensure dependable performance and network redundancy by locating your server in a state-of-the-art data center.
• Test Server Response Time: Before choosing a location, it is recommended to do server response time tests from many locations using tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix.
• Redundancy and scalability: Pick a web host that gives you options for redundancy and scalability. Two crucial factors to think about are scalability and redundancy.

Avoiding Common Mistakes in Server Location Selection

Choosing the best place for a website's server to reside may be a complex process, and mistakes made at this stage can have far-reaching effects.

Poor performance and longer loading times can occur if you neglect to consider the geographical dispersion of your intended users, test various servers in different regions before choosing one, and employ content delivery networks (CDNs) or caching techniques.

A typical error when choosing a server location is forgetting your intended audience's geography. If you know where most visitors come from, consider a hosting firm with data centers nearby to ensure quick global response times.

Your European server's physical distance from North American users will cause delayed page loading and significant latency. Most of your visitors are there.

Many users must test servers in many locations before choosing one. To get a provider with fast enough speeds for your website, compare performance measures like TTFB and latency. When comparing services, consider extras like customer support and security.

The greatest spot to host your website is near your audience. If you've tried that and your website still loads slowly, switch web hosts.

Conclusion

The location of your website's server installation is crucial. Customers despise waiting around; thus, this greatly affects how fast your website loads. Customers are more likely to spend more time on a site if they are pleased with its quickness.

Furthermore, search engines like Google prioritize speed while striving to provide users with the most relevant and precise results. Remember that data transmission times may increase if your server is far away; this is only good for some.

Because of this, locating your server near your target audience is recommended. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are another option to consider speeding things up even more. Be brief, be near, and ensure those visitors will smile!