Why you should choose an Australian Web Hosting Service
There are a bunch of 'warm and fuzzy' reasons why you should choose an Australian based web hosting service.. such as supporting local jobs and the Australian economy etc etc. However, at the end of the day, your website will perform better if it's hosted in the same region as your customers.
There are many factors that have an impact on the speed of your website. Server hardware is important, adequate CPU and RAM allocations are contributing factors, then efficient code deployment and optimised content (such as image size) also help speed things up.
However, these factors become redundant if you’ve chosen to save a few dollars and host your site with a discount hosting provider based overseas. Like all international travel, it takes a lot longer to get to an overseas destination than it does to get to the Sunshine Coast for a long weekend. When you visit a website, a bunch of work is done in the background before anything loads, just to obtain the address of the server that your website has been plonked on!
This is known as the route, and the route is broken into a series of hops as it follows the sign posts to its ultimate destination (your website). Now, take the below example, this is the route to one of our clients websites, hosted on one of our servers based in Sydney. We’ve got 5 hops and some pretty quick times for each hop.
For our next example we’ve chosen ‘audi.com’ because it’s hosted in Europe. Note, if you are looking to buy an Audi in Australia you should visit ‘audi.com.au’, which is their Australian based website (I highly recommend it, even if you are just window shopping), but by targeting their parent website we can demonstrate a long route, with the bonus of running through some servers that actually contain location names.
Ooooohh.. 12 hops and a really long time to get there. If you add a poorly performing destination server into the mix, or poorly optimised content, then you’d be seeing high bounce rates and low session times in your webs stats (a bounce being when someone arrives on the page and leaves without clicking on anything, and the session duration is the average time users spend on a page). A lot of visitors just wouldn’t bother waiting for your web pages to load. Now, if you throw in network bottlenecks or server issues with any of the hops, then the time just blows out exponentially.
As mentioned earlier, this is just one factor that determines the speed of your website, however it’s the first link in the chain and the other factors don’t become apparent until the route is completed. So give your website the best chance of success and host in Australia.
If you have any questions regarding this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.
