When considering where to locate your server, the best location will depend on the quality of the hosting providers available, their connection to the global communications network and the proximity to your target markets. You should also briefly consider the legal, political, environmental and exchange risks.
Here’s a comprehensive overview of server location factors, and some information to help you make the important decision about where to host your website.
Web infrastructure
The worldwide web is made up of thousands of interconnected networks. When a user requests information from your server (like loading a web page, for example), the information has to travel from your server to your hosting provider’s network, then between several other networks, via some exchanges and switches.
The main thing to consider when you choose a country to host your website is a reliable local network (local to the hosting provider) and a fast, close connection to internet exchanges that serve your target market(s). This, and the quality of the hardware and technology used to make these connections, are the most important locational factors to consider when choosing a hosting location.
Hosting providers’ infrastructure
Server hosting requires highly-developed technology and expertise, as well as long term investment in power, cooling and network infrastructure. These factors are not always available in sufficient quantity and quality to make hosting available in a certain country or region.
A web search and recommendation request on a forum or social media platform will tell you quickly if there are providers in a particular location. But check the hosting provider’s website closely for details of their infrastructure, and speak to them with any questions you have in order satisfy yourself about their data centers, the efficiency and performance of their technology, and the level of expertise in the organization.
Look out for redundancy in the network – that is to say, if one element fails can the rest f the network continue unaffected – as well as the number and reputation of upstream suppliers that connect them to the the wider web.
Country and regional infrastructure
A hosting provider has many investment decisions to make in order to make their network as reliable and fast as possible. However they are also reliant on the communications infrastructure within the region they operate, something outside of their direct control.
Energy supply
In his own 2008 research on data center costs, James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services estimated that around 41% of data center costs related directly to power consumption. This demonstrates what an important part of a hosting provider’s costs is represented by powering the servers, buildings and cooling systems. But the actual cost varies enormously with the price of electricity in the location where the data center is located.
Research by Hydro-Quebec shows a huge variation in electricity prices for large power consumers in North America alone. New York, which the research shows to have the highest electricity prices, had prices 167% that of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada), which had the lowest rates.
shopel’s home of Montreal, Quebec (Canada) was the second cheapest electricity prices in the same research. This is party due to the fact we are 98% hydro-electric powered.
Lower electricity prices allow hosting providers to invest more money in their own infrastructure and/or give you a lower overall price.
Network infrastructure
While New york may have the highest electricity prices in North America, there is a reason you will still find some of the most important data centers there. It is a major communications hub with and an important part of the worldwide web infrastructure, so many companies choose to situate their hosting or data centers in the city or the region.
The internet is a physical phenomenon that is reliant on data being transferred around and between networks owned by Internet Service Providers. Peering (sharing) means that data can generally move freely around the established infrastructure.
The hubs, or points of connection and exchange of the internet tend to be concentrated around traditional business centers around the world, with a high concentration and higher capacity in North America and Europe, as well as financial centers in the middle and far east, and developing economies in Latin Americas.
This Internet Exchange Map by TeleGeography shows you the global distribution of internet exchange hubs, with the ability to zoom in on areas of interest.
The diagram below, also from TeleGeography demonstrates the main routes for data flow around the world as well as their bandwidth (capacity), which is a factor in your connection speed. The size of the line indicates bandwidth.
global-internet-map-2006-x
Risk
Most hosting is done in countries where the industry has been present for a number of years, so it is easy to avoid ‘risky’ situations. However as Hurricane Sandy demonstrated in October 2012, the unexpected arrive up at any time. It’s always better to have considered the risks.
Exchange risk
As well as relating to the quality of the server or hosting package you buy, price will to some extent be affected by energy prices, as discussed, as well as exchange rate fluctuations. Consider the currency in which you are billed and how volatile that currency is in relation to your own currency.
Political & legal risk
Each country or jurisdiction has different laws on data security, and different track records in their treatment of data privacy and commercial organizations in general. Although there are few instances of companies being innocently taken offline by the authorities, you should be aware of the risks. The Patriot Act in the USA, for example, has received a lot of coverage because of the powers it gives the authorities to seize physical servers as evidence.
In some countries, certain content or applications may be against the law, or what is generally acceptable use amongst hosting providers. The easiest way to verify this is to check the terms and conditions of the hosting providers to satisfy yourself that your content or business is ok.
Environmental risk
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and floods occur all around the world each year. Hosting is often found in relatively low-risk areas, but the commercial or infrastructure advantages of a location with an elevated risk means that these kinds of events do occur in popular hosting locations. Hurricane Sandy in New York took some high profile websites out for a few days.
But there are also some advantages afforded by extreme weather. Here is Montreal we ‘enjoy’ five months of the year with average temperatures below freezing. Your toes get cold, but the cold air comes in handy for keeping a data center cool.
Proximity to market
The distance that data has to travel between your server and the user, and the number of ‘hops’ between networks that it has to make will affect the speed that your website loads.
However, the extent of the effects of distance will depend greatly (more so than the distance itself) on the nature of the connection that the hosting provider has to other networks. This brings us back to the importance of the provider’s infrastructure and network, and their connection to major internet exchanges.
If your hosting provider has a well-connected, reliable network that uses high-quality switches and hardware, the difference in speed in places with a good internet connection will be a matter of tens of milliseconds to load a web page. Not necessarily something to be too concerned about, and, for many people with international websites, not enough reason to go to the extra expense and complication of hosting different sites for each market in different geographic locations.
Indeed, moving to a better hosting company that is further away could actually save you time if their network and hardware is much better.
The increased latency, potential reduction in throughput and slight delays caused by geographical distance will be accentuated for media, data and websites that need high-bandwidths to deliver things like streaming video content. If you absolutely need to deliver lots of page elements, pictures and video then the distance between the user and your servers will become more pronounced and may warrant a relocation, or further investigation. If your website is not reliant on these elements, a better way to improve download speed is to optimize your website’s CSS, consider how and where you host images and videos (within your server architecture) and reduce the images/bytes of data in your pages. Your hosting provider should be able to advise you on some elements of this.
The fool-proof way to make this decision is to speak to a hosting provider about speeds in different locations for different packet sizes. Most hosting providers should be able to provide this information, or at least the means for you to run a test from your current location.
Server location & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Server location is one of the many factors Google considers when attempting to ascertain if your website is relevant for a particular country or language market. Google says:
“Server location (through the IP address of the server): the server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal.”
Many SEO professionals believe that server location has become relatively unimportant in SEO geo-targeting, and the statement from Google states that they do not count this as a definitive signal. Indeed it is not always practical to host an international website in several locations and it would be wrong for Google to penalize this.
shopel believes that the benefits of using a single domain with language or country sub-folders (yourbrand.com/de/ rather than yourbrand.de) more than compensate for having a single server location rather than one in each market. Other simple geo-targeting techniques can improve your targeting further. These include:
ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) – buy your brand’s domain with the country extensions that you are targeting. For example buy yourbrand.de and use a 301 redirect to send traffic and search engines to yourbrand.com/de/
Local link-building – By being present in a country market, and building client, business and influencer relationships, you will naturally earn local links, a very strong indication that your website is relevant to a particular country market
Use the geotargeting tool in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to tell the search engines for which countries your content is intended (NB this only works if you have seperate domains or subdomains for country-specific content).
If you have physical business locations in different country markets, create local business listings (linking to the relevant ccTLD or a localized page on your website), generate address citations (in business directories for example) and leverage address and telephone numbers on your website by using microformat markup to explicitly tell search engines that this information relates to an address or location.
Use hreflang tags to state the intended language or country market for a page and its alternatives. This may have additional ‘clustering’ benefits, where search engines apply all rank signals (like inbound links) for pages within the cluster.
Vineri, Decembrie 25, 2009
