Website Hosting and Location
You don't need to live in North America to take advantage of the many low cost hosting providers that are available there. It doesn't matter where on the planet you live
(I'm sure there are a few exceptions), as long as you have a credit card and can pay the hosting costs you can host your website anywhere you want.
So where should you be hosting your site? Why not host it in the cheapest location?
A quick look on the web will show you that, in general, a UK hosting provider is more expensive and offers less features than a North American one.
So if you live in the UK why not take advantage of the cheaper USA hosting and domain costs and choose a US host?
Well I believe you should but only if your business is truly World Wide. If it has a local element then it should be hosted on a UK/European hosting provider.
The reason is that Yahoo and MSN both seem to give preference to local sites.
If you do a search using Yahoo.com and Yahoo.co.uk for a given key phrase you will generally see two very different search results.
You will find that the UK search results favour UK based sites and vice-versa.
So if your Jones the plumber based in Telford Uk, and you decide to go for a .com domain name and USA based host you have basically just scored an home goal.
Your hosting costs will probably be less but so will your search engine position and traffic. Now this situation could change. In fact it has done in the last few years. Two years ago Yahoo didn't seem to care where you hosted your site but then it changed.
I know because I saw my traffic drop from Yahoo, as this site is Hosted in the UK. Today I get 19 times more traffic from Google as from Yahoo. Two years ago they were roughly
even.
My general rule of thumb is if you are targeting local customers us a local hosting provider if not use a North American one.
Website Hosting Providers
There are many hosting providers on the Internet but you may save yourself some time by taking a look at the ones below:
UK Hosting Providers
USA Hosting Providers
-
Blue Host Web Hosting - $6.95/mo!
- USA based Professional website hosting . Incredible feature rich
package including WordPress, Joomla, Cpanel admin and
Fantastico scripts. Supports multiple domains.
Includes free domain name.
- Site Build-it- This is a totally different solution as it is a complete website building, hosting, promotion package. To learn more
about site build-it start with the site build-it review on this website.
City/State Hosting
If you look at the searches on Google you find that there are
many who search for hosting in a particular city or state like:
Arizona website hosting, Seattle website hosting
There is no need to to get that specific with the location.
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