How Data Center Location Impacts Your Website?

Posted by Sharmin Islam on October 16th, 2019

Having a fast website is all about its success. Slow loading will affect your website both in terms of google ranking and visitor's attitudes. Your traffic may not wait a long time for a website to load. It will turn them to move to your competitors.

Many factors can affect page loading time. It depends on the hosting server location, amount of bandwidth in transit, and web page design – as well as the number, type, and weight of elements on the page. Other factors include user device, browser type, etc.

Among all, the server location has a direct impact on your website and should be a critical factor that features in the building of your site.

Now we will know how the server location affects a website's performance.

Page loading is the amount of average time that a website takes to be visible on the visitors' screen. Maximum visitors expect a site to load in less than 3 seconds.

To know how server location impact on website's speed, it is very important to be aware of the server latency. Latency is the time (measured in milliseconds) when a packet of data takes to reach its destination from the server requested by the users. To explain it better, users send a request to the server via the browser then it is processed by the webserver to send a response back to the browser.

Let us look at the example that shows how latency works.

A high amount of latency results in poor website performance that negatively affects the SEO, and can induce users to leave the website. If the Servers located far away from the users affect negatively on the page loading time.

If your targeting traffic is mainly in the Asia region and your hosting provider has their only data centers of the USA. The latency will be up to 300 ms, which means the data must travel halfway around the world to reach each visitor while the latency of the Europian server will be 200-250ms for them. The latency of 100 or less than that is considered reasonable, and you will find it on the Asia servers based on your location.

You should keep in mind that visitors won't be able to interact with your site due to latency issues. To resolve the problem, you need to find a host that has multiple geo-located servers closer to your visitors.

Some important facts about the website's performance associated with the server location you should know.

• Google critically considers the page loading time of a website while calculating the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). When it finds that the page load time is increasing from 1 to 5 seconds, the bounce rate of the website automatically increases.

• Most of your users will stop watching videos on your website and look for some other alternative if they take too much time to load. One second delay in loading will result in an approximately 7% decrease in the conversion rate of your website.

• The server location has a huge effect on your business bottom line. If your site is served by one server from the USA yet you offer to the visitors in Asia and Europe, they will experience much lengthier loads times.

In the competitive world of technologies, you must contend hard for your Internet traffic. One of the key elements in your mission is the positive impression of search engines like Google. It views a website and influences visitor statistics. Slow websites lose users and may get penalized in search rankings.

How to Overcome Server Latency Issues?

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is a good way to solve the latency issue and can be considered as a permanent solution to it. It refers to web traffic management and application delivery over multiple data centers in various geographical areas. GSLB minimizes network latency passing user requests to the nearest servers. For example, if the server or network outage affects Germany server, the load balancer will redirect traffic requests to other nearest servers that have the shortest response time.

The use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) will help to reduce latency. It caches your website data on multiple locations around the world to help increment the speed at which your site serves data to users. It means that loading a webpage will take less time improving the website's speed and performance.

As I mentioned how server locations affect a website, the best way to avoid this issue is to choose a good web hosting service provider that offers different server locations. If you have a strong conception of where your targeted visitors should be coming from, that's good.

As a reliable web hosting company, MyLightHost offers multi-data center locations in the USA, Asia, and Europe. You can choose Dedicated Server Singapore to get the fastest response time and best for operating in the Asia Pacific Region. Their data centers have several features that can help to increase speeds and benefit both for you and your users. It includes 100% uptime, 24/7 tech support, full root access, and so more. Besides, they use premium software for server protection that prevents various types of hacking in addition to DDoS, SQL Injection, privilege escalation, information disclosure, malware exploitation, malicious PHP, and Perl shell scripts uploading.

Conclusion

Website speed and server location are very important since it impacts not just how Google ranks your content, but also how users experience your site. I hope, from this article, you will get the idea of speeding up your website and perceive the importance of choosing the right location when it comes to your hosting data center. Hopefully, that has been cleared up here.