Geo-hosting your business

MUMBAI, INDIA: Getting your business online and targeting the right audience is the most important factor in the modern era of the Internet. Good relevant content and right SEO practices can do wonders for your website. But, are these the only deciding factors to rate higher in search engine results page?

In the year 2010, Google revealed to the world that it will also take into account website loading speed, while deciding which website will rank top of the search results. To counter this condition, you might have started to optimize images on your website, removed java scripts that took long to load and even took help from third party CDN services to reduce the load times of your website. But there exist solutions today that give 10x faster speeds for your website. What is India Hosting?

India Hosting is nothing but Geo Hosting, bringing the Web Hosting servers closer to your website's target traffic here in India. Previously, the market used to rely heavily on servers which were based internationally, especially in the UK and US. Looking at the emerging Indian Businesses online, it has become imperative for us to establish home based servers, to cater to the ever growing needs.

Why should you host your website in India?

Your web page load time has become a thin line between a successful website and a not so successful one. An online research done by Mashable claims that "1 in 4 people abandon a web page that takes more than 4 seconds to load". There are many reasons to a slow loading website and one of the key contributors is Latency.

Latency is defined as the time taken by the server to receive and process the request made by the website user. Latency is affected by the distance between the web server and the website users. By hosting your website on a server located in India you have largely reduced the impact of latency on your website. This is possible since the distance for a request to travel to the server has considerably dropped down.

In an independent test carried in BigRock's labs, it was found that the latency of a server hosted in India is more than 30X lower, compared to a server hosted in the US. If you're running an e-commerce site, targeting customer's in India, then imagine the advantage you have over your competition. Your fast loading website will retain customers and they will get to read more of what you have to offer and in return your conversions are going to hit the roof.

Targeting the right audience is another advantage you have when you host your website on Indian servers. Search engines recognize that you are hosting your website in India by checking the IP address of the website. They also use this information to rank your website higher for any query made by an individual in India, compared to the websites that are hosted in international grounds.

If your target audience is based in India, then it really makes more sense to host your website in India to rank higher on the search engine result pages.

The only thing that might bother you slightly is that you will have to shell out some extra money to host your website here in India, since bandwidth is not very cheap, like it is in the US or other countries. But honestly, it is a very small price to pay to get all those benefits to power your website. It's like spending "A Quarter for a Million".

So for businesses that solely thrive on visitors based on specific locations, it is generally advisable to go for a flexible GEO-hosting plan; as it will guarantee a distributed cost and definitely save money and harassment in the long run.

The author is product manager, BigRock.