Colocation servers: Is your server located in the right location?

The big questions is – does the hosted location of the server really matter and make any difference to your clients or the end users? Let me elaborate. Will it make any difference if the server is colocated or hosted in a different country and the end users are in another country in terms of access speed and performance?

Well it does! It makes a lot of difference in terms of access speed depending on the location where the server is hosted. For instance, if your clients are located in UK and their website is hosted in a server which is co-located in Singapore, then your clients will experience slow performance while accessing their website. How slow it could be will depend on what is being accessed. If the website contain simple picture and plain HTML pages, your clients may not notice the slow response but if it’s an hosted application on the server, then they might see very slow response from the server.

It’s always advisable to host a server in close proximity of your clients. If majority of your clients are from USA, then host the server in USA based data center. If they are from UK, host a server in UK based data center. But if they are located worldwide, then locate the server in a US based data center.

Also, when you colocate, make sure that the data center is near to your location so that it’s easy to go over and take a look at the server in emergency situations.