I am a UK webmaster with a site designed for the US market. I currently have shared hosting facilities with a UK host. I'm looking at changing and would welcome opinions on whether Google cares whether you have a US or UK based server or even a dedicated server . Cheers,
The location of your server is one of the factors taken into consideration when determinating if a site belong to a specific country (for local search). Google cares when fetching country-specific results. Some of the other factors taken into consideration are domain extension and locations/domain of the sites that link to you and that you link to.