With the vast amount of local and international web hosts out there, it can be difficult to choose the right one for your needs. Each web host will offer many extra bells and whistles in order to get your attention, but there are really just a few handful of key aspects you should focus on when deciding on your web host.
One of these aspects is whether you should use a local host (in Australia) or an international host.
To help clarify this issue, we’ve put together an objective list of pros and cons of local vs. international web hosting, so you can choose the right one that fits your needs.
Local Hosting
Advantages
- If your customers are based in Australia, having a web host who is also based in Australia will be an important factor. The further away your web host is, the longer it will take for your website to load, meaning you will have a higher bounce rate. If you’d like to know more about the significant impact page loading speed has on your visitors (backed by trusted sources like Google), check out this post here.
- In relation to page speed, your website will also enjoy the benefits of higher Google search rankings as lowering bounce rate will improve your search rankings.
- The support team’s opening hours will be during your business hours meaning you can get a timely response to your enquiries.
Disadvantages
- Often local web hosting will be more expensive than international web hosts due to the differences in wages and other costs like internet infrastructure.
International Hosting
Advantages
- Usually cheaper bandwidth (cost per GB).
- If you have a large market overseas (e.g. US customers), it will be beneficial to have a web host that is based in that country due to increased page load speeds (for those overseas customers) and better Google search rankings.
Disadvantages
- The support team’s opening hours may not be during normal hours (due to time differences), meaning you may not be able to get immediate support.
- If your international host decides to perform a scheduled maintenance, your website could be down during critical hours (due to time differences).
- Despite the cheaper bandwidth, the up-time and reliability can be of low quality (depends on which web host).
In Conclusion
If your website will generate revenue primarily from Australian customers, we highly recommend you go with a local Australian web host. You can’t beat the improved website loading speeds and the benefits that come with this, such as lower bounce rates and higher search rankings on Google.
In addition to this, during your day-to-day operations, you will inevitably run into IT issues that need to be handled your web hosting provider – a local web host will be able to respond to you during normal business hours.
However, if you need a personal website where up-time and reliability is not an important issue, you can go with a relatively inexpensive international host.
At the end of the day, you should always do your due diligence on the background of the web host you’d like to go with. We’ve written up a concise eBook on the factors to consider when choosing a web host here (that you can read for free).
If you need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’d be happy to have an open discussion with you.