Benefits of hosting locally (in same country)?

I run a website, which is not business critical, and in fact is not actually a business. It is a hobby site, that makes me next to nothing via google adverts. However it is a fairly high traffic site, and it has outgrown shared hosting and suffers fairly greatly from being on a shared host.

As such i am considering moving to either cloud or VPS hosting.

Being that I am in Australia I was thinking about moving to an Australian VPS host, as this will offer greater response times to my largely Australian audience.

However I am trying to balance the speed between value and cost.

Hosting in Australia is always fairly excessive due to our 3rd rate ISP's and telecommunications network.

So really will i see enough benefit hosting in Australia rather than say hosting in somewhere close by like Hong Kong, Singapore etc, or even the US?

Dan

 

Host where you find a reputable hosting company. It doesn't matter where you live.

 

SERP's can be affected by where you host (geo targeting) but that doesn't seem to be a concern. I think the actual host and their servers/service would be of more concern than whether or not they were in Hong Kong or Australia.

 

Danny, if value for money is your concern, you should consider a Los Angeles (US) VPS over Singapore or HongKong. The hosting price of Singapore and HongKong are comparable to Australia. Los Angeles location is more targetted towards Asia and Australia.

We have tested the speed with Whirlpool users and they are certainly satisfied with the download speed they have gotten from LA. Latency from LA to Australia is about 150 to 160ms if this is not an issue to you. You are likely to get a better value of money, in term of storage, bandwidth and server specs.

I have gotten a download speed from Singapore to LA server at average of 320 to 340kbps (theoretically max is 375kbps) on my 3Mbps broadband from Singapore. Latency is 190 to 210ms.

 

+1.

My host is located in UK, and I live in the US.

 

The benefit is just you can go to the company.
You can check it by yourself.
And maybe it will cheaper.

But i think, use what you feel is good

 

The benefit to me, is when i have problems, i can easily call and contact them.

 

...and you might find out that your hosting company has outsourced their customer services to another country too

 

I believe the Danny's question need to be understand thoroughly by the posters here.

His main concerns are
- location of his VPS
- not compromising the speed of his AU visitors
- getting value for money at the same time

and not the reputation or quality of the host.

 

I think that is good idea to have web hosting ion the same country where you are from, but at the same time if you are growing you may need to expand your business. In this case web hosting services from USA are recommended.