Hi Guys - I run a UK based co.uk website and I am using JustHost at the mo. As you know they are based in the USA, my questions is, do you think my site would be ranking better if I had a UK host company? It just something I have been worried about - any ideas or tips would be amazing. Thanks PS
The location of your host will have no effect on your search engine rankings. As long as you are happy with the service I would stay, as it can sometimes be a pain to transfer a site.
The only advantage you might get is a slightly lower latency from when visitors from the UK visit your site. The difference is usually not noticeable to the end user though.
No its not necessary. It will not affect your ranking. The important thing that can affect your ranking is backlink and PR.
for SE that doesn't matter where your web site is hosted. The server you are hosted on should have good uptime and that is the must
If your target visitors are from UK then you should definitely go for a UK based server. As the traffic will increase the difference in speed can be easily noticed by the end user. There are two advantage if you host your website in UK 1) Search Engine would categorize your website as a UK website and the rankings would improve in .co.uk 2) the end users will get better browsing speed. It's better to switch now than later.
Can you justify the search engine part? Does it depend on the 'server' location? im not too sure it does! the domain is a .co.uk and so the server location should play a small if not no part at all.
We have servers in both the UK and the US because our SEO clients like to place the sites they are optimising in the country they are targeting. As I'm not an SEO I can't say if it really does any good or not. However I have had .co.uk domains hosted in the US show in "pages from the UK" and as first page results for quite competitive terms. Would I move my site, only if: I was unhappy with the current host My site was AJAX heavy or that type of thing and most of my clients were in the UK, the speed difference can be noticeable Site was failing in the UK results then I'd give it a go on a UK server
Well I know people moan about JustHost, but I have never had any problems with them, and the site is very fast and has over 85,000 pages, so I think that's good. The site is only a few months old so I will have to keep an ryr on search results etc
Keep an eye on the number of pages and size. They have a pretty strict fair usage policy and suspend if you more resources.
As a parting shot if there's doubt about the host I'd make sure I have a good set of backups so that I could put the site online somewhere else.
That's what I am planning on do, and why I am asking the questions etc - just want to cover my arse lol
Is there any other problem other than the location of the servers, if no. You should continue with the same host. Generally it is recommended that you should have your location of the server at the location where you want traffic from , if you are facing problems in traffic and you want targeted traffic from UK you have all the options open in the Uk datacenters
I am very happy with the service I am getting and its well priced, I was just concerned that it would effect the rankings for the UK, and that's really what I want to find out, as it would be better to move now than later.
It is recommended that you host your website on servers located in the country you are targeting so as to get better rankings in search engines. When it comes to response time of the website, if the hosting provider you consider has good connection speed for the servers, you shouldn't face any problem with response time of website