Benefits of local hosting

It's one of many factors in seo - local hosting will make no difference in my opinion, UK hosting is preferred but not essential.

Depends what your trying to sell and the competition.

Go for good customer service. It's really important when it comes to hosting. I go for UK companies that are small or mid sized but can tap into same type of infrastructure as the bigger companies. I find smaller companies look after me better compared to some of bigger ones - to them I am small fish and probably not worth too much effort or time.

Hi Lina

Going to stick my head well above the parapet and say this is total cobblers.

You will hear this argument again and again on a variety of forums.

Location wise, it makes absolutely no difference hosting your website in the USA, Greenland or The Isle of White. As for being local to your town, definitely not. If you have a great local provider, then fantastic, but it won't make any difference traffic wise.

What does make a difference is:

• The URL extension, eg .com | .co.uk etc (Google will let you set a location within webmaster tools, but this doesn't work for all search engines).
• The quality of the hoster. Simple, you get what you pay for.
• If using shared hosting, the volume of other websites on the same server as you, and potential bad neighbourhood problems, ie spammers, porn sites etc.
• Response time and uptime, ie the time it takes for your web pages to open, and how frequently your website goes off the air due to hosting problems. Google has said now that it includes response time as one of its algorithm signals.

The reality is, with the way the dollar has been for the last couple of years versus the pound, for companies looking at multiple dedicated server solutions, then this make using large hosting firms in the States attractive, as they tend to be cheaper than UK alternatives, and the big outfits have superb levels of customer service.

There are now some pretty decent UK alternative, but a few years ago, after a very nasty experience with one of the UK's largest hosters, we decided to have our larger UK and US sites on dedicated servers based out of Texas. They have been there for years, the service is exceptional, and trust me, we have no problems with traffic.

But...

If you are looking for shared hosting solutions, then the UK has plenty of competitive and low cost options.

We use EZPZ Hosting for smaller shared hosting stuff, and Global Gold for this forum which is on a Virtual Private Server. Happy with both if you're after any recommendations But there's plenty of good stuff out there.

I'd say just the UK, don't think having a local host will benefit really.

Steve has pretty much..well said exactly what you need.

Hats off.

My domain is .com

What are my options to utilize .co.uk if it is that important?

If I buy an additional domain.co.uk and make it alias to my .com, will it help in anything?

Go into Google webmaster tools and set your Geographic Location to the UK, if it isn't already.

If you do go for a .co.uk domain, then personally I'd redirect the .com to the .co.uk so any links, pagerank etc will be passed to your .co.uk

That was done at the first place



Do I really need to do it?

My 5 pence worth, no.

90% of your traffic will come from Google, and setting your geographic location to the UK should do the job.

You mentioned buying a .co.uk, so if you did have one, then I''d redirect the .com, but I wouldn't worry about it.

Ahh, I will not go into my normal rant here, but stick Local, if for no other reason to support our economy and not another countries!

Money made in the UK should stay here!