I have reviewed 2 sites in a row with hosting that is outside of their own countries. I understand that price comes into play when deciding who to host with, but try and think of your server’s location like a window shopping gallery. You wouldn’t want your high end boutique clothing store to be in the middle of a corn field in Idaho would you?

The same goes for your hosting, your server should be where your customers are. If you happen to have clients in multiple countries you may want to consider multiple hosting locations to take care of your local clientele. Latency between the client and the search engine are taken into account when rankings are calculated. As well as which local search to place you. If you happen to own the local TLD of the country, this is less of a problem. For example, if you have a site hosted in the US and have a co.uk address it will be easy for Google to determine which local search to display the results within.

In most cases it does not make any sense to host a UK site in the US, unless all of your data centers are in the US and it would be very expensive due to the size of your business to re-locate. If this becomes a problem a possible option would be to use a PROXY server, this will allow you to funnel your traffic to a local server, say in the UK and have a direct pipe back to your data centers in the US. Usually this will reduce the load time of the client as well depending on how big your pipe is. Undoubtedly this will raise your hosting costs.

I personally struggle with the large data center issues on a daily basis and wish I could have local hosting. Just so you are aware Google has data centers all over the world, its very easy for them to tell how bad your response time is! I have found that my sites rank better with lower latency levels.

Choosing the right hosting platform can be critical. Do I need dedicated hosting? Should I choose Windows or Linux?

Designing the site should come after these basics are planned out. Your first question that you need to ask yourself, what type of site am I building?

Here are 2 buckets of sites, which is similar to yours?

A).
Small content site, less than 50 pages
Family tree
Photo album
Blog

B).
Forum
E-commerce Site
Video Based Site
Music Site

If you fall in the A bracket, basic shared hosting is more than enough.

However if you fall in the B bracket, basic shared hosting will not be enough. Depending on how much volume your site is going to do you need to decide between the following.

Virtual Private Hosting – Commonly used for sites with a lot of dynamic features but not an abusive amount of traffic.
Dedicated Hosting – For larger more robust sites with a lot of traffic.

I never recommend hosting in a Windows environment, no matter what Windows is still not stable enough for hosting. Any server that requires reboot’s for stability is not a great environment. Linux is always your best bet and is usually less expensive. You may have several options with a Linux hosting environment, usually between Apache and Tomcat. Now Tomcat is known to be faster, but Apache is supported in a larger array of modules. Tomcat is based on Apache and is not that much different, however a MOD REWRITE is far more difficult to implement.

I commonly recommend PHP has your language of choice, it’s very easy to develop with and tons of free add-ons.

Make sure your server includes MY SQL, the most common database available. Very easy to setup and maintain. If you plan on doing a lot of traffic you may even want to have a separate database server from your front end server.

From an incorrect source of information I was told that IP Blocks in the EU are all the same and it did not matter if you had a UK,FR,IT,DE IP. This is simply not true, if you have an IP address from the UK for example and put another EU site on it. It will become local results for the UK address, even if the language is not correct. The only way to accomplish this, is to be totally sure that you have an IP from the country that you are targeting. Pick your hosting solutions very carefully.

The alternative to this method of course is to own the TLD’s for each specific country, which was not an option for my experiment. In theory it would be best to host your site in each country keeping the TTL (Time to Live) as low as possible. I believe that a superior solution to this would be implementing a small array of proxy servers that would keep hosting costs to a minimum. Contemplate your solution very carefully, this can cost you severely!