best server location for your site

How to pick the best server location for your site

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  • Post category:Dedicated Server
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Geolocation is no longer an important consideration with the fast internet and modern servers available to support your business. Because information exchanges via the web are so fast, the location may no longer be an important consideration for entrepreneurs. While VPS and shared facilitating servers might not need to be executed quickly, most customers demand unwavering quality, speed, and execution when it comes to your dedicated server.

However, clients still feel slow when trying to find information at incredible distances, regardless of the server’s speed. This is because there is a lot of information exchange between the client and server. It is generally a good idea to have servers located near clients in order to reduce the time it takes to exchange information. The truth is, even the fastest association can’t guarantee the best execution unless you pick the right area for your dedicated server.

Importance of Server Location

Depending on the server provider, the server hosting your website may be physically located at any of the available locations in data centers around the world.

A signal is sent when you access a website from your computer to the dedicated servers and then on to the destination. It will take longer to establish a connection if the server is farther away.

The location of your server’s host server can have a significant impact on your website’s loading rate and, by extension, your SEO.

Research has found that 47% of web visitors expect web pages to open within 2 seconds. Mobile users make up more than half of Google’s users. It’s not surprising, considering the attention span of today’s netizens.

Google indicated site load speed as one of the main signals they use to rank pages. Visitors leaving your site before it has loaded fully is bad SEO. This can lead to lower conversion rates, which will negatively impact your business’ earnings potential.

Effect of Server Location on Website Speed

Is the geolocation of dedicated servers important? 

Moderate sites can be extremely confusing to clients and have a negative impact on business. Research has found that 53% of mobile clients will abandon a site if it takes more than 5 seconds to open. You can hasten up your website by choosing servers that are located near your target advertiser.

Simply put, yes, the server/data center location has an impact on the website’s speed.

When choosing a web hosting provider for your website, the first thing you should do is determine from where most of your visitors come.

Why is this important? Because the servers where your website is located play an essential part in your TTFB (time to first byte) and overall network latency.

Defining TTFB & Latency

There are many factors to consider before you decide on the perfect server location. Two of these factors include network latency or TTFB.

Network Latency

It refers to the time it takes for a site visitor to connect with web servers. It is the time that the request will be processed and data to be sent by the servers. The longer the distance that the information must travel, the longer it will take for it to reach its destination. It is measured in ms (milliseconds), but it can vary depending on the network. There are many factors that affect network latency, including:

Round trips – This is the journey made by an object request (script, HTML, etc.) to your web servers and back to you. Round trip is affected by the distance between the web servers and user, as well as the number of intermediate points over which the connection travels.

Server’s performance: This is the correlation between the server’s performance metrics, including the server’s speed, available memory, and site latency.

A small increase in latency can affect page load times and user experience. eCommerce websites that have high latency may benefit from this.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for the browser to open a webpage following requests from your servers. There are three main aspects that can impact TTFB:

  • The time it takes for your requests through the servers to reach the network
  • The total time it takes for the server’s response to be generated and processed
  • The time it takes for the response to be transmitted back to your web browser

There are two methods to measure TTFB:

Actual TTFB – This is the time taken for a web browser to receive the first byte of data from the servers. The actual TTFB may be affected by network speed and connectivity.

Perceived TTFB – This is the time it takes for the user to notice that a page is loading. It is an important UX indicator as well as SEO metrics. The time it takes to get an HTML file parsed is largely influencing this.

Your webpage will take longer to load if the information is too long. Remember that TTFB should be as low and as short as possible.

Picking the Best Server Location for Your Website

We will now look at some of the tips that you can use to determine which server location is best for your website.

Find out where your audience comes from.

Find out where your target audience lives. That is, you need to determine where they are located. Next, observe the patterns and identify the areas that appeal to them. It can be easy to move to another area within the supplier’s network by choosing a supplier that is based in the region. A strong foundation is key to driving traffic. Separation is an important factor in the execution of your website. It’s a smart decision to choose the server location closest to your target audience.

Determine the proximity of your data center to the IXP.

Your site’s execution can be affected by the closeness of the servers to your client. This will not make a difference if there is a significant separation between the Internet Exchange Point (IXP), and the server location. The IXP is the foundation of the internet. It serves as an intersection or marker focusing information that allows the information to travel in many ways. This reduces the transmission capacity. Server farms located far from the IXP often experience more noticeable idleness because the information must travel a long distance.

Assess your data center performance.

If your servers are not able to provide value, it will be of no use. Many facilitating organizations provide obsolete equipment without security and reinforcements. A server farm could also suffer from the effects of inadequate ventilation, fire insurance, control, and so forth. It is important to check the area of your dedicated servers. Also, consider the foundation to make sure you get what you are paying for.

Reducing Network Latency

To improve latency in your network, there are many steps you can take at various points. You can check that your network is not being overloaded with downloads and using too much bandwidth. You should also check the application performance to ensure that there are no unusual or unresolved issues that could be putting strain on your network. Subnets can be created by grouping endpoints that are in frequent communication with one another. Traffic shaping and bandwidth allocation can also be used to reduce network latency.

Using a Content Delivery Network

CDNs can be used to lower network latency. This will improve your website’s performance as well as UX. Any of these methods can reduce website latency:

Content caching CDNs cache and store compressed mirror versions of web pages in strategically located data centers. Your users can then be delivered content based on their geolocation. This reduces round trip times as well as latency.

Connection optimization CDNs optimize connections between users, origin servers via session reuse, network peering, and TCP pre-pooling. Premium CDNs accelerate the communication process by routing traffic through a network backbone with the fewest hops.

CDNs not only reduce latency but also increase load times by front-end optimization such as image optimization, minification, and file compression.

Conclusion

When choosing servers to host your website, price is a major consideration. You may also be tempted to find servers near you.

However, investing in servers close to your website’s visitors can make a big difference, especially if your business is online. It is how quickly your customers can access the site, locate an item and make a purchase that will determine its success.