US or danish host for danish site

Hi, i currently use godaddy (us) for hosting. Will my site be faster in Denmark, if I got a danish host?

 

No, a server in Denmark will not necessarily speed up your site. You may have reduced latency time, which is only an issue if you have large files (such as videos) or a large number of file requests. Otherwise, this is only going to add a fraction of a second to your page load time (that is almost unnoticeable). As for your site being faster, GoDaddy is notorious for having overloaded servers that result in slow load times. Are you having a problem with slow loading pages? You can use tools.pingdom.com to measure your load speed.

 

I disagree. Your site will absolutely be faster the closer you put the server to your userbase. Yes, it is a fraction of a second (probably anywhere from 100-500ms), but when you are transferring dozens of files just to load a simple page, that delay all adds up. As well, any large file transfer is going to be remarkably slower.

Is it a really huge difference that your clients are going to recognize? Who knows? You can only figure that out with testing, but things will absolutely 100% be faster the closer you get to your users. That's the whole concept behind a CDN, anycast servers, etc. If there's no difference, might as well shut those services down too.

 

While hosting is a critical factor in your site's speed, your site's design and code efficiency often have far greater impact on performance.

Too often people overly focus on latency. If the server is closer to your users, the latency will be lower. But latency is usually not an in issue for most web sites unless you are using AJAX, videos, chat or other highly interactive features that require a lot of back and forth between the servers.

If your page take 3s to load, trimming 100ms from latency is not going to help too much.

My recommendation is to test:
http://www.webpagetest.org/

(I have a round up of more tools here: http://www.rackaid.com/blog/website-performance-testing/)

Also consider you are just not changing locations but also hosting. So the new host could have faster servers that could give your site a boost.

For a well designed site, backend issues (hosting, server speed, etc) only account for about 20% of the performance problem.

Here's an excellent article on this point:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/

People spend a lot of time worrying about servers (which is good because I am a server admin) when most of the time they should be focusing on design issues like reducing the number of CSS/JS includes, moving blocking elements to the bottom of the page and so on.

Lastly, if you don't want to move hosting and just want better performance, consider a service like Cloudflare.com. They can put your data closer to your end users as well as handle some frontend optimization for you.

 

This is what a lot of people completely fail to understand when it comes to latency. You aren't trimming 100ms off the load time of the overall page. You're trimming 100ms latency off of EVERY SINGLE FILE. If you have 20 images on your page, that latency is going to exist for every single one of those images, the php file, etc. It all adds up.

 

If you have your website hosted in US, your website will load slowoer than in US. If your website is hosted in Europe, it will load faster in Europe etc. The loading speed (in Europe) difference between an US hosted website and and Europe hosted website could be 1~2 seconds, depend on your hosting provider. You can do some tests. I strongly recommend you to try an Europe hosting for the best user experience.

 

@WSWD I understand latency just fine -- the problem is using 20 HTTP requests for images when 1 HTTP request and CSS spites would be more efficient. In fact, less than 20% of site performance issues has anything to do with hosting.

The point I am making to the OP is that worrying about where your site is hosted is premature until you understand the problem. If you have blocking JS, CSS repaints/reflows, you can host your site under your desk and see little improvement.

For a great resource on this see:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/