Pros, Cons and Coupons for Overseas Hosting
Overseas web hosting is generally less expensive than domestic hosting, largely due to low cost of data traffic in many overseas countries. While this may be appealing to the price conscious consumer, if you are an Australian business and the core of your customers are located in Australia, there are compelling reasons to make sure your web and email are hosted in Australia.
1. Speed – There can be a noticeable lag when trying to access servers hosted overseas when compared with local servers. So if you need to make frequent updates to your website or are often transferring multiple large files, the speed difference between a web host in Australia and a web host in a different country can be significant.
2. Reliability – While the location of a server doesn’t necessarily have a direct bearing on it’s reliability, there are more possible points of failure between you and an overseas server than between you and a local server. Australia is connected to the rest of the world by a few large undersea cables – and problems with these connections have in the past caused large numbers of overseas sites to be inaccessible via some Australian ISPs!
3. Support – Something else to keep in mind is that having a hosting provider in the same country as you will save you a considerable amount of stress should something ever go wrong with the service. Instead of having to wait for assistance from a data center all the way across the other side of the world, a hosting provider in Australia means that problems can be fixed in your own time zone, without the cost of international phone calls or the frustration of language barriers.
4. Search Engine Optimization – Every web site is assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address which may be used by some search engines to determine the geographical location of the site. If your site has an overseas IP address, it may not appear in the search results for some Australian users.
5. Server Time – Servers located overseas are often set up using the timezone where they are physically located, not an Australian timezone. Unless you configure your web site to adjust for this time difference, tracking things such as order placement time if you run an e-commerce site, or the exact time at which other visitor activity took place can become confusing.
6. Maintenance Schedules – Most web hosts perform scheduled maintenance and server backups outside of business hours to minimize the impact on their customers. But if you host your site overseas, “late night” there could be the middle of the day here, and you could find your site frequently offline or performing sluggishly at the very worst time each day.
It is also worth noting that just because your web hosting company is Australian, does NOT mean that your web site is located in Australia. There are many Australian web hosting providers who locate their servers overseas for economic reasons. To be certain that your site is hosted in Australia, you can either ask your web hosting provider or use an online geo-location tool such as http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm or http://www.intodns.com/ to verify the physical location of your web server.
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