1) A website's loading speed is critical for search engine rankings and user experience. The location of a site's data center impacts speed, as data must travel farther over the Internet the greater the distance between the data center and users. 2) Choosing a web host with data centers near your target users can minimize latency issues. A reputable host like SiteGround offers global data center locations that allow choosing a site near visitors. 3) Using a content delivery network is another option to cache site data on servers worldwide and increase speeds, though hosting locally remains preferable.

1. How Data Center Location
Impacts Your Website

2. Having a fast website is something that used to be great to have, but today it
is literally a requirement. Slow websites affect your site in both terms of
search engine ranking as well as your visitors’ attitudes. 47% of website
visitors expect a site to load in less than two seconds.
While there are doubtless many things that you can do to fine-tune your site
and improve its performance, one thing that is a little more complicated is
your choice of web hosting service provider. The web hosting provider you
choose has a close relation of where the data center is located.
Without you knowing, the data center location actually impacts your website
and should be a critical factor that features in the building of your site.

3. How Server's Location Impacts Speed
Data travels through the Internet via a network of cables. Even as fast as
electronic pulses and signals are, the longer the distance the data must go,
the longer it will take to reach its destination – it’s simple math. The time
taken for data to travel from point A to B is called latency.
Let’s take for example if you were to be running a website that targets users
who are mainly in the Asia region. If the web host you’re with only has data
centers in the U.S. that means the data that makes up your site literally must
travel halfway around the world to reach each visitor.
You also need to bear in mind that websites aren’t static, meaning that data
needs to be critical as the visitor is interacting with your site. If a user clicks a
button, that request goes back to your server, and new data is again sent to
the user.

4. Think of it the same as driving a car over a distance. If I were to drive from
Mendham, New Jersey to Manhattan, New York, it would take me around an
hour or so. If I were to drive from the same location to Austin, Texas, it would
take me more than a day.
At the same time, just as with road conditions, Internet lines have traffic. The
more data being sent through the line at a time, the more likely your data
transmission will be slowed. If this is added on to a longer distance for data
transmission, you are likely to end up losing users frustrated at how slowly
your site loads.
To summarize, as you can see from what I’ve said so far there are two main
factors involved here; latency and traffic. To resolve the latency problem, you
need to find a host that has servers in locations closer to your visitors. To
avoid traffic congestion, find a reputable web host as it is more likely to have
greater bandwidth to handle large amounts of traffic.

5. Should You Just Host Locally?
If your visitors happen to be in a location or area where there are reliable
local web hosting companies, then that would normally be ok. However, I
would instead advise you to look towards companies who focus on the
global stage instead.
Bigger web hosting companies often tend to have more money to invest in
both expertise and infrastructure. As a result, I have often found that local
companies can’t match them in terms of both price and performance.
While there might be situations where data is required to be hosted on
servers physically located within certain jurisdictions or borders, this isn’t
exactly common. It would be far wiser to cast a wider net in your search for a
good web host.

6. Why Website Speed is Essential
In the competitive world of websites today, you must fight very hard for your
slice of Internet traffic. One of the key elements in your quest to do so is via
search engines like Google. Today, your website speed directly affects how
Google ranks your website.
Yes, there are other factors involved and it is a complex blend of various
elements, but speed is one known factor. To compound the issue, the latest
Google updates now also include how fast your site serves pages onto
mobile devices.
If you’re unsure about how your site performs, WebSitePulse offers some
free tools you can use to test it. There is a list of tools that can help you to
monitor the specific components of your website or server. You can find out
what the end-users are experiencing when visiting your site.
For example, Web Page Test can verify the URL availability and measure the
download speed of your website component. There are up to 40 monitoring
location options you can customize. This can help you simulate performance
from various locations so you can choose an ideal server location to move to.

7. Overcoming Server Location Issues
Choose The Right Web Host:
As I mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to avoid this issue is to factor in
server location before even building your site. If you have a rough idea of
where your targeted visitors should be coming from, that’s good enough.
It is here that I would recommend looking towards hosting with a reputable
company that offers you a choice of server locations. One excellent example
of a host which provides this is SiteGround. SiteGround has servers in data
center locations strategically located around the globe – the US, UK,
Netherlands, and Singapore.
This means that if you decide to host with them, you can opt for any location
in the general geographic zone where your visitors should be coming from.

8. Use a CDN
If you’re reluctant to move to a different server for any reason, another
possibility is o make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs
help cache your website data on various servers around the world to
help increase the speed at which your site serves data to users.
While not ideal as to having an actual site hosted near where your
users are, CDNs are an option that can help. One example of a good
CDN you can use is Cloudflare. There are free plans for you to try out
before you decide if you want to spend money on a premium account.

9. Conclusion
To put in a nutshell what I’ve covered so far, your website speed is essential.
It is a critical element of how Google views your site and affects visitor
statistics. Slow websites lose users and may get penalized on search rankings.
How well your site performs is heavily affected by the distance from the
location you are hosting into the location your site visitors are from. Try to
opt for a web hosting provider that has servers in a data center location in
the general proximity to your target visitor base.
There are some ways that you can overcome the latency issues, and one of
them is by opting to use a CDN. However, I recommend spending the time to
look for the right web host to work with as that is a much more direct
solution to the problem. The CDN is still applicable and can help your site in
other ways as well.