There is no reason not to use a server in your locale.
Locations where your website’s server can be hosted can vary. Different servers are hosted in different data centers around the world, depending on the server provider you go with.
When you load up a website, the signal travels to the server, and then onto the destination. If the server is far away it could take quite some time for that connection to happen
Loading speed is something that should be taken into consideration by webmasters as it has a crucial effect on both SEO rankings and visitor experience.
KISSmetrics found that 47% of people expect a web page to load within 2 seconds. This is even more popular among mobile users, who make up over 50% of Google’s users. It’s no surprise considering most people can’t work with slow speeds or less concentration.
Google has indicated that site loading speed is 1 of the signals for how they rank pages. So, visitors leaving your page before it is even fully loaded will only hurt your SEO and conversion rates. Load time not only impacts Google rankings but also customer satisfaction rates and sales.
What Is Network Latency & TTFB?
When choosing your server’s location, there are many factors to consider. Two that we’ll focus on today are network latency and TTFB.
What Is Network Latency?
Network latency is the time it takes a visitor to connect to your site, their request to be processed, and the site data to begin arriving. Several factors can affect this time, including:
Round trips: A round trip is a journey an object request takes to get from your web server and back to the user. It’s generally affected by the distance between your web server and the user, as well as the number of intermediary points through which it travels along their way.
Server performance: This article covers how to measure the performance of your website or blog to see how well it performs for visitors. Recording the stats from these measurements can help you know when changes should be made in preparation for traffic spikes, making them a better resource for future design projects.
Any small change in the latency can have some sort of effect on page load time or user experience. This becomes more important for eCommerce websites where high latency can improve the speed and user experience of the website.
KISSMetrics explains latency through the measuring of TTFB.
One significant factor that affects any web pages loading time is the time it takes for the user’s browser to retrieve the HTML content from your server. This is commonly known as “time to first byte” or TTFB. TTFB can be affected by three different factors:
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The total amount of time it takes for your request to reach the network through the server .
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The total amount of time it takes for the server to process the request and generate the response.
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The total amount of time it takes for the response to propagate back to the web browser.
There are a few ways to read TTFB:
Actual TTFB: The total time it takes for a web browser to download the first byte of data from a server. Network speed and connectivity can affect how long it actually takes..
Perceived TTFB: The time taken for a visitor to load the page. It’s an important UX and SEO metric and is mainly influenced by how long it takes for the HTML file to parse.
Choosing the right spot for your server is a tough decision. It may depend on what you use your server for, as well as the cost and level of hardware it offers.
Choosing the ideal server location isn’t as easy as you think. Interestingly, many people are choosing to use hosting providers with overseas data servers because they offer a great solution for both cost-effectiveness and overseas market reach.
How Do People Server Location?
When was the last time you put some thought into where your server is? We ran a survey among customers and here’s what they had to say:
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66.7% chose a server in proximity to their own customers;
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11.8% chose a server that’s physically close to themselves;
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3.9% didn’t really consider the location of their servers;
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17.6% said they are global and use CDNs.
You should consider various factors when choosing where to place your server, such as the location’s proximity to other hardware in the network, power sources, and environmental design.
Choosing the optimal server location for your business may be a bit overwhelming at first, but here are some key points you should keep in mind when making your decision.
Around 66.7% of people surveyed said they prefer to choose the server location closest to the majority of the site’s audience. When choosing a server location, it is important that you consider where your target audience is likely to be located. Database management is critical to the operations of any organization. With that in mind, you should be aware of physical location when making your choice.
How To Reduce Latency?
Over the course of your network, you might find different solutions to improve the latency. This might be something like decreasing bandwidth usage and getting rid of constant downloads (wherever possible).Make sure the application performance is running smoothly to ensure apps are working well in addition to lessening pressure on the network. You can also subdivide the endpoints, group them by function with other endpoints that communicate often. Using traffic shaping and bandwidth allocation measures can help to reduce network latency.
Use A Content Delivery Network To Reduce Latency:
One way to reduce your website latency is to use CDNs, thus improving your overall website’s performance and UX. You can reduce latency by any one of the following methods:
Content caching: Content is cached in strategically-located data centres, which are spread around the world. This ensures that content is delivered faster to customers in different parts of the world.
Connection optimization: CDNs can speed up the way your site loads for your visitors by reusing previous sessions, negotiating peering agreements and pre-caching content on a fast tier 1 network backbone. Premium CDN services provide an even faster and more secure connection for you to take advantage of, using connections routed through the largest CDNs in the world.
With CDN’s, not only can you improve your site’s performance in terms of speed, but also optimize your site in the front-end to reduce load times with things like image optimization, minification and file compression.
Where Is The Best Place For Your Server?
With such price differences when choosing a server, it is important to think about location or budget for your business. You may find the device closest to you tempting, however it is still worth looking at prices and browsing available products.
If your visitors are spread around the world, it can be hard to choose a server because they’re all generalized according to location. However, investing in a server that’s close to the majority of your site’s visitors can be a real game-changer, especially if you’re running online business. After all: how fast your end-users can access the site and make
How the proximity of your servers impact your website’s success
Hosting your website closer to your target audience can help give you a boost in their success for all sorts of reasons. It really makes sense if they’re in the area/country that you want to cater to.
One of the most important things you can do for your website is to make sure it’s hosted in a location that is geographically closer to your customers. Many business owners don’t take this into consideration and end up hurting themselves.This can dramatically slow down your site and the more often it takes longer for pages to load, the more visitors you could be losing.
Since you’re using this server to host your site visitors and clients, servers close to them will need to be considered.
The process of changing your server location, or CDN, can seem overwhelming. The good news is that the steps are relatively simple and it should only take around 10 minutes to change.
What happens if your hosting provider doesn’t let you change your server’s location?
In this case, you have a couple of options:
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Change hosting provider
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Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Web hosting can be a pain to switch, so with Cloudflare, you can have the best of both worlds – secure Hosting & blazing speeds!
Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs for short, are a group of servers that are placed across many separate locations for speeding up their delivery.
A cached version of your page is stored at each location, so someone who visits your site will be shown the nearest server on the CDN network. This means you’re less likely to be experiencing server overload.
Using one can significantly shorten load time by increasing the delivery speed of your site’s data that’s cached on the CDN. This is not the same as web hosting, however, since the CDN is used only for caching your site’s data to improve its delivery speed, not hosting it.
A good site performance is difficult to achieve without a well-placed server, which you can get from various providers. There are also many CDN providers to choose from — CloudFlare, Imperva, StackPath and Sucuri.
Cloudflare is a popular & convenient option for hosting. Their cloud-hosted servers make it easier for you to manage your platform or website from your account dashboard. You can also combine Cloud with Cloudflare to get the most out of both services
In Summary – Choosing Your Ideal Server Location
Choosing the ideal server location plays a crucial role in its success.
Owning a website can be complicated. Make your life easier by hosting it on servers that are close to your target audience, which will lead to better conversions, fewer visitors abandoning the site & better SEO.
Secondly, a good CDN will significantly enhance the speed of your website. It will do this because it caches your site’s content on a group of servers located in various locations. This means that the site can be accessed even faster, regardless of where it is hosted.