I will be launching a youtube video to mp3 converter website this week and my current provider is currently in perth, Australia. I expect most of my visitors will be from the U.S so does it make more sense to go with a provider based over tehre instead? Also, what is asp.net hosting? Thanks
Server Location does not really matter to much, however, keep in mind if your visitors are from the US and your hosting out of Australia, they will most likely have a longer page load time then if they were in the same general area. ASP.net hosting is windows hosting that supports asp.net built designs.
When referring to ASP, that's usually referred to as the server-side scripting for servers with the Windows Servers. PHP is the server-side scripting that's typically used on Unix Servers. Although Windows Servers offer you more like ASP and MS-SQL (along with most of the stuff offered on Unix), I would recommend Unix as you'll generally have less issues. I'd actually say server location is very important. Like Jay said, there will most likely be a longer page load time. Reason is that distance actually matters when dealing with Web Hosting. Not that there will always be lag or anything, but it's a further distance and more work to do to transmit all that data. You could always consider looking into Akamai. Akamai is a tool that caches your site on various different servers around the world (or maybe just the U.S -- I forget...), so depending on where the user is located that's accessing your website, it will try to go to the closest server. Many of the bigger companies do this to provide a better experience for their website users.
Server location does really matter if you are targeting site visitors from only 1 area. It is because every HTTP request have a round-time trip from the requester (client's browser) to the webserver before the browser start downloading the website's content (the phenomena is commonly called Time to First Byte) This is an example : visitor's browser (in US) send HTTP request to your server (in AUS) need 100 ms, and then the webserver answer the visitor's request back, again 100 ms, it is 200 ms for 1 TtFB. What if your page needs 10 requests before the page is completely loaded? Without pipelining, the visitor will need to wait 2s for ONLY a set of round-time trip (don't forget there are still content download time) If the visitor and webserver are located in a same or near place with only 1ms round-time trip, they will at least 2s faster then the one from US -> AUS Therefore, Yes it does make sense if your visitors are generally from US, you should stay with US based server
As Vince and Jay said, If its a general site which is going to attract worldwide users then it really does not matter where it is hosted, But if you want to target users from the UK for example, ideally you would want a hosting server that is in the UK as there are less waiting times and less for the information from the server to be sent. But it also depends what you want to host, If its legit stuff then anywhere really but if its cracked , nulled etc etc scripts then you would ideally be looking for a offshore host or in netherlands, But offshore does come at a slightly more expensive price.
More important is network quality. Location matters, but if the network is good, then the location won't affect the hosting. Although it is recommended that the closer the data center location the better it is.
For general purposes, I would say that location isn't all that important. However, in this scenario you should probably consider a hosting provider with a US DataCenter. US to Australia is about as far away as it gets, and especially if you are streaming video, your visitors may notice some lag time during views and uploads.
Wouldn't you be paying a ton for bandwidth?, Australia is very expensive for bandwidth. Apart from using another location, you could look into using a CDN service.
Server location really doesn't matter much, but its better to have servers in USA rather than anywhere else because most of the visitors are from USA.
If you're really going to be attracting visitors primarily from North America, it would be a serious mistake to host in Australia. Not only because hosting seems to be more expensive over there (higher input costs, etc) but because capacity and routing will frequently be a problem. The US dedicated server market offers tons of compelling providers.
I would stay in the US. Like Jbiloh said, Australia is much more expensive and and routing will be a problem. There are many budget providers in the US that fit your needs.
Location of the server is not important. Just ensure the service providers reliability, down time of the server, technical support etc.