Web Hosting: Location of Servers

Servers anywhere in the world can host your website and we know that there are some very fast servers in the USA. But there are other factors to consider.

• We have found a three day delay between delegating a doman name to a host in one country and it showing on ISPs in another country. In Australia it takes between 2 hours and overnight.
• If your main target market is USA then that's a reason to host your website in the USA. If you target Australians then they will open your website quicker if it's hosted in Australia, by a quarter of a second per page and image.
• Communications can be difficult between different time zones.
• Some USA hosts require domain names to be transferred to their registries.
• A host in USA closed down recently giving little notice to Australian clients.

Find the location of the host of any website at www.whoishostingthis.com/

Test the time it takes for a data packet sent from your ISP to the host of any website. At the command prompt (or Start > Run >) type PING and the domain name or IP address. Another interesting command is TRACERT which tell how many hops a packet of data takes between your ISP and the server of a website.

We took times for the following domains hosted in Sydney, Brisbane and Florida. We are located in Newcastle, NSW and did a ping around 7:00 pm on a Sunday night. The difference between Sydney and Brisbane for us was only 15 milliseconds, but between Sydney and Florida the difference was 235 milliseconds. We tested these domains:
— platypuswebsites.com.au (Sydney)
— platypushost.com.au (Brisbane)
— barberipaullfeit.com (Florida, USA)

We therefore recommend hosting Australian websites in Australia.
 

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Tuesday, 26th May 2015
Newcastle, Australia