The main difference between hosting your website locally versus overseas:

  • Cost difference
  • Customer service
  • Hosting location

Cost Difference

Web hosting, like pretty much everything, is more expensive in countries such as the US or UK – they pay higher taxes, higher wages and must generate a higher income to remain profitable. In contrast, companies in countries, such as India, can offer their services much cheaper due to their economic situation.

Customer Service

In the web hosting industry where prices and services are standard, customer care often becomes the main differentiating factor amongst providers. Most web hosting companies are specially trained on dealing with customer and work toward providing top-notch service.

Do keep in mind that hosting your website in countries with different customs and time zones can be frustrating – communication barriers, understandings, time difference, etc.

Hosting Location

The closer the servers are (geographically) to the site visitors, the faster the pages will load as a greater distance means there are probably more nodes for data to pass through before it reaches the user.

If you are aiming to target a specific audience, you should use a country specific domain extension (ie. .ca for Canada, .uk for the UK), use local web hosting and focus on building links that come mainly from sites in that geo-location. This way, it allows the search engines to easily determine where your market is and more effectively rank and display your website in search results.

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