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How important is being hosted in your main target country?
tnunneker
Posts: 1
Joined: 10 Sep 11
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24 Nov 11 6:01 am

How important is being hosted in your main target country?

Hi Everyone,

I'm in the US and will be targeting the US, and other English-speaking countries, but the company I wish to get hosting with is in the UK. I've done a lot of research into hosting packages, customer service, and pricing, and JustHost in the UK seems the best in all 3 categories, plus they even have incredible live tech assistance from pleasant people at all hours of the day & night, not outsourced call centers heaven knows where.

But from what I understand, it can hurt ranking, and also hurt possible approval for CPA & other offers, to have your hosting in a country different than your location & main target market.

How important is this and how much can this effect ranking and/or approvals?

I would appreciate anyone with experience with this perhaps sharing how problematic it might be.

I have had horrible experiences with customer service, both American based & American companies' outsourced CS depts. And since I'm new to this, I have a feeling I will end up on a first name basis with the CS Tech Dept, wherever I choose hosting, LOL, so it would be nice if I could go with a company that I already know has outstanding CS.....but I also don't want anything to hold my business back.

Thanks for any assistance or insights!
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cecille.l
Posts: 6369
Joined: 25 Feb 11
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24 Nov 11 10:34 am

 Having your site hosted on a different country from your own and your target market has an effect on your ranking. But this is minimal as there are other bigger factors like backlinks, relevance, quality, etc. Take Affilorama for example. It is hosted in the US (I'm not really sure. Please note that this is an example only.), and I am located in the Philippines. Yet when I run a search for affiliate marketing, Affilorama.com shows on the #1 spot.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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essexboyracer
Posts: 105
Joined: 02 May 11
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24 Nov 11 10:02 pm

 Google indexes domains rather than countries, so you should strive to get your domain as optimized as possible.

You will have factors such as internet lag, e.g. someone in the US accessing your site which is hosted in the UK may take more time to load, and therefore send potential traffic somewhere else. How lag has an affect on SEO i don't know, probably not much
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Site Admin
michellerana
Posts: 1874
Joined: 05 May 09
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25 Nov 11 3:57 am

 Hosting your website in the local country makes it load faster for your targeted customer.

Regarding ranking, I believe that as long as you're providing good content, it shouldn't matter much where your hosting is based.

tnunneker wrote:
But from what I understand, it can hurt ranking, and also hurt possible approval for CPA & other offers, to have your hosting in a country different than your location & main target market.

How important is this and how much can this effect ranking and/or approvals?


Most CPA offers are limited to US, UK and Canada. I don't think you will have a problem if your hosting is different from your target market since both countries are included the list of locations approved by CPA networks. In addition, many merchants elect to "auto-approve" applicants from the US and other English-speaking countries (CA/UK/AT/NZ) because they find it's easier to monitor and respond to fraud issues than to allocate the time to reviewing applications.
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Michelle
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cecille.l
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Joined: 25 Feb 11
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25 Nov 11 5:28 am

 Page load times matter to Google as explained in Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.
Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed , YSlow , WebPagetest , or other tools . For more information, tools, and resources, see Let's Make The Web Faster . In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.


Still this is only piece of the overall ranking system and something that could easily be resolved.
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Cecille

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esolutions
Posts: 475
Joined: 28 Apr 09
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26 Nov 11 5:22 pm

 Hi,

You should checkout http://internetmarketerhost.com. Great customer service, but also, most things are setup for you correctly so that you don't have to spend time trying to integrate a bunch of different services which end up being support issues.
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