Country Based Host

Hi,

I run several UK based sites but i am currently hosting these sites on a USA based server, how much difference will it make putting my sites on a UK host? I don't want to switch if i am not going to see improvements as UK hosts are a lot more expensive than USA hosts.

Cheers,
Adam

 

It depends on how well site is ranked already. It does make difference but if site is ranked well now i would not bother. Domain name for country would help more.

 

It is not ranking great at the moment, but the site is fairly new around 4 months but still saying that there is around 10,000 pages indexed so far.

 

It would also depend if you want to rank of local uk keywords or more general keywords.

 

Yes all keywords and site is focused at a UK market.

 

There are 3 main factors that can help with geographical search results...

1. Using country coded top Level domain name
2. Creating backlinks to your site from that geographical location.
3. Hosting the site in the geographical area your trying to rank in.

Now, two other factors can be useful as well...

1. Content written in the language of the geographical area.
2. Setting geo-targeting in Google Webmasters Central (non cc-TLD)

Remember, it isn't required for you to do all this to rank properly in geographical search results, it just makes it easier.

 

From swapping some of my own UK-specific sites to UK hosts from USA ones I think it does help, but hard to pin down exactly how much as I've never done that change only and left it, I'm always changing other things too. For a real site (not some MFA thing) the cost between usa/uk hosts is neglible, compared to the profits. I would always host in UK if its a UK business. If you ended up needing to make a single phone call to the host and its USA based you'd have spent the difference on the phone call alone anyway.

With hindsight a lot of my websites should have been on .co.uk domains, but that was a newbie mistake and not easily corrected like the hosting one was.

 

Revising all of your content into UK english might help as well.

 

Thank you for all your comments, just out of interest? Which UK host do you use as i have heard about fast host but they seem very expensive.

 

I use various different hosts, which makes it safer linking between your own sites. The only one I can think of off the top of head that I know the pricing for is http://www.eukhost.com/, £38/year. All depends how much bandwidth etc you need.

 

I have heard mixed reports about them, have you used them before?

Also i have i need a reseller account as i have around 20 sites i need to host.

 

Yes thats one I'm actively using now with no problems. If you are going to interlink those 20 sites then a reseller account is not a good idea.

 

Ah good , is it a fast server then?

I am linking about 10 of them up and i know they should be on separate ip's but that would cost too much for me at the moment. I have a large site which has 10 small sites linked to it these are keyword targeted to the my main site.

 

I wouldnt link them together if you can't put them on the same host. You say it'll cost too much, it'll cost even more if some of them end up de-indexed.

The server seems okay but its not a high traffic site so hard to say. I've got another UK dedicated server, which can handle 10k uniques an hour at time. Its not me that deals with the hosting so I cant remember the company, I do know it costs about £120 a month though.

 

Although I cannot be certain for some reason I do find my UK websites that are on .co.uk tld as well as hosted in UK rank better in UK searches. Although I am positive this is more to do with .co.uk tld than that fact that they are physically hosted on UK servers. Most of the internet and email traffic is routed via us in any case so I do not see physical location having much of an impact. For example when some one in UK tries to access a website that is stored on UK server, 90% of the times the request will be routed via states anyway.