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Ask HN: Should I use a host in the UK?

5 points by nudge ↗ HN
I'm setting up a new site in the near future that will cater almost exclusively to people in the UK. Is there a great advantage to using a host in the UK for this? I imagine there would be an advantage in speed, which google has started to use (a little) in its rankings, but I don't know how much that would matter.

Is there anything else I should be considering?

4 comments

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byoung2
Regardless of where your site is hosted, you should be taking advantage of a CDN to serve static files. For popular Javascript libraries like jQuery, use Google's CDN and your users might already have it cached if they've visited another site that uses the same library. For your own images (and maybe Javascript and CSS), host them on Amazon S3/Cloudfront, Rackspace Cloud Files, etc., so that users fetch these from edge servers near them.

If you visit any one of my sites from the UK, you would get the HTML from Dallas/Ft. Worth, but the images, CSS, and Javascript would come from a Limelight (Rackspace Cloud Files CDN) edge server in the UK.

If your site focuses specifically on the UK, you could eliminate all those calls to the server in Texas, but it wouldn't make that much of a difference.

nudge
I had planned on using google for jquery, yes, but I didn't realize I could do what you describe with my own static files. The site will use some pretty hefty javascript, so that could make a noticeable difference. Thanks.
ig1
Apparently google does take into account the location of the IP address when doing country specific searches, but I don't know how big a factor that is.
byoung2
I'm willing to bet that if you have hundreds of pages of unique, relevant content, plenty of legit, relevant inbound links, and good on page SEO, things like site speed based on geography are negligible.