| By Gavin Payne - More articles by this Author
There are three reasons to locate your hosting locally - in Australia. I’ve assumed that the majority of your target market is based in Australia and that is why you are interested in comparing US vs Aus based hosting. The number one consideration when hosting a website, application, data-base or whatever, is location, i.e. putting it as close as possible to the end user.
So assuming most of your target audience is in Australia, the following 3 factors should influence your decision to host your website in Australia.
Speed: This ties in nicely with "location", the single most important consideration! It is a proven fact that there is more latency when visiting websites hosted in America as compared to websites hosted in Australia; when you are viewing from and based in Australia. This can be quite simply explained: Everything on the internet travels at the speed of light - all good connections anyway :-). So if something, anything (a packet of data in this case) travels from point A to point B and back again at the speed of light, it is only logical that the shorter the distance from A to B the quicker that something will get to the final destination. In this case, these packets of data have to travel across the entire Pacific Ocean to get to the US and then travel all the way back again to show you the web page you are viewing (and every subsequent page, bits-of-data and images after that)! So, not getting too technically involved, it is fairly straight forward to understand Australian based servers and web hosting doesn’t need to travel across the biggest ocean in the world, and therefore will be faster than US based hosting!
Support: Isn’t it nice to call someone and actually be able to speak to them during “normal” hours? Aside from this, if there are any types of disputes, how successful do you think you are going to be at resolving them as opposed to dealing with a local company under the same law as yourself? Australia has Departments of Fair Trading that are designed to protect the consumer from getting the short end of the stick. Seriously, what are you going to do with a US based company if they don’t want to co-operate, or if they don’t take your calls or emails? Think about it.
Economy: Why support another country’s economy. I have nothing against supporting foreign trade or foreign business and I would actually recommend it if you can’t get that same product or level of service locally. However, given the facts above, and especially when the local product and service is available at a competitive price. Why go looking overseas for something you can already get locally and is in fact better!?
Gavin Payne is the managing director of NewSprout Hosting and he has been involved in the Hosting industry for over 6 years working with many global companies including Bidvest, Telstra, AVIS, AT&T, VISA, Peugeot, BMW, Motorola and many others. NewSprout is an Australian company offering website hosting, email services and domain name registrations to business and personal clients. For more information visit www.newsprout.com.au/why-newsprout-hosting.php.
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