It makes a very big difference on whether you host your site in the same country as your targetted visitors, or overseas!
In this case...if your majority visitors are Australians, there are four reasons to locate your hosting locally - in Australia. And the main consideration when hosting a website, application, data-base or whatever, is location, i.e. putting it as close as possible to the end user. This improves speed and availability by eliminating the reliance on international links.
The following 4 factors should influence your decision on where to host your website:
Speed: This ties in nicely with "location", the single most important consideration! From an Australian perspective...it is a proven fact that there is more latency when visiting websites hosted in the US as compared to websites hosted in Australia (when you are viewing from and based in Australia). This can be quite simply explained: Everything on the internet travels at the speed of light - all good connections anyway
. So if something, anything (a packet of data in this case) travels from point A to point B and back again at the speed of light, it is only logical that the shorter the distance from A to B the quicker that something will get to the final destination. In this case, these packets of data have to travel across the entire Pacific Ocean to get to the US and then travel all the way back again to show you the web page you are viewing (and every subsequent page, bits-of-data and images after that)! So, not getting too technically involved, it is fairly straight forward to understand Australian based servers and web hosting doesn’t need to travel across the biggest ocean in the world, and therefore will be faster than US based hosting! Many people say it doesn't matter, but it defintely does and that prompts the second important consideration.
Search engine visibility: Search engines base their algorithms on a number of factors, one of them being the IP address location. Also, the actual domain can help, such as a .com.au domain for a business website targeting the Australian market. Overseas hosting can still work with some additional steps, like logging into the search engine webmaster tools and telling them who your target market is. But by default the country of your target audience is given priority.
Support: Isn’t it nice to call someone and actually be able to speak to them during “normal” hours? Aside from this, if there are any types of disputes, how successful do you think you are going to be at resolving them as opposed to dealing with a local company under the same law as yourself? Australia has Departments of Fair Trading that are designed to protect the consumer from getting the short end of the stick. Seriously, what are you going to do with a US based company if they don’t want to co-operate, or if they don’t take your calls or emails? Think about it.
Economy: Why support another country’s economy. I have nothing against supporting foreign trade or foreign business and I would actually recommend it if you can’t get that same product or level of service locally. However, given the facts above, and especially when the local product and service is available at a competitive and very affordable price. Why go looking overseas for something you can already get locally and is in fact the better option if your target market is Australia. Many people say Australian hosting is expensive, however if this is your business you are talking about, any hosting, anywhere is a negligible cost.
Also, beware of "unlimited" offers, these are unsustainable and if you choose to use one, be sure to have complete control of your domain name and have very frequent backups of your website.
