How To Choose The Best Datacenter Location For Your Website?

While choosing the best location for data center, the most suitable approach is – The closer, the better!

Hosting your databases and applications close to your target audience is always best. Doing so will drastically reduce the latency for a potential customer, especially for people who need apps that are used frequently.

It’s time to ensure your business is not losing money because of where you host it!

Low network latency is essential for data centers for optimal system performance. An ideal data center location is the most critical factor because the location has great significance. Thanks to advancements in the cloud, latency ratios are becoming increasingly smaller. With data centers closer to end users and high-bandwidth infrastructure in place, there is less delay or lag for processing requests.

One of the most important considerations for a company is to consider where should a data center be located so as to assure flawless hosting of the web server. Cost and server location are the primary factors in choosing a web hosting service.

Generally, a latency of less than 100 ms is good for optimal page loads, whereas 200 to 500 ms is generally acceptable.

After all, your website has to serve your audience with the best experience in the best possible way, and selecting the best location for data center plays an important role here.

How to determine your target audience?

If you are not sure about the location from where your website is getting the maximum traffic, you can try this:

Look at your Google analytics to know the number of people coming to your website from different channels.
If your website is new, have a quick look at the demographics of your target users.

Your decision should be based on the choice of the data center location that is nearest to your audience location.

Why does the data center location matter?

Latency is the time required for the data to travel back and forth. It is the time used between your server and your computer. The more distance your data center is away from your location, the slower it will be, and the slower the website will load. This means that users will have a more challenging time accessing your website.

All websites have different loading times. It is preferable to choose a centrally located data center to reduce latency. This is because you will experience less downtime and shorter page-loading times, so your visitors will enjoy a better experience when browsing your site.

You can save time and improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) with faster connections and low latency. This might result in higher placements on Google SERPs.

Essential Tips for Data Center Location Considerations:

– Proximity

There are two types of proximity to consider: The first is proximity to your website visitors. The second is proximity to boosting the sales of your business.

Website statistics can be found with the use of analytics software. Knowing where your site is accessed most and how it is used will help you make future design and marketing decisions.

Signing up for a Google Analytics account will allow you to access your website’s data. For example, this data shows where your visitors are located. Looking at user statistics by country shows where most of your users come from. You can find cities by clicking on different regions on the map.

Selecting a server located in the same country is recommended, but note that it may not be necessary and could even cause a slight decrease in speed. Breaking it down by state or city will likely only make a negligible difference.

Instead of focusing on proximity to your audience, choose a data center web hosting location near your business. For example, you might do this to visit your data center and see what’s happening. Some may think choosing a data center in the same town as your office is a good idea. However, if you partner with the right web host and rely on their support, you probably won’t need to visit your server often.

– Connectivity

A data center that has powerful connectivity to the internet as well as interconnections to other data centers ensures that your organization’s data can be transferred quickly, reliably, and using minimum latency. Several geographical locations of the country have more dependable high-speed internet as compared with others. A constant internet connection with low latency will improve the experience for your end users. In case a primary link breaks, it can prevent disruption through redundant connectivity, such as multi-ISP links or content delivery networks.

Companies need to take into consideration interconnectivity from the other data centers to this particular one. An organization with its offices across a network of different data centers within the country promises much in terms of reliability as opposed to the ones whose offices are near one another. Consider what might happen in the event of a power outage in a metro area, or extreme weather, such as a tornado, hitting multiple towns nearby.

– Power

Power is one of the most important factors one needs to keep in mind during data center selection. It is not only essential for the day-to-day operations of the data center but also keeps all the devices running during different interruptions. Hence, the costly data centers have reliable access to electricity as well as proper cooling infrastructures for maintaining their hardware from heating. In the course of analyzing a data center, it is advisable to ask about the price per kilowatt usage and the cooling systems they’ve employed.

– High-Performance Hardware

Choose the data center location keeping in mind that the data center in that location is equipped with all the latest storage and networking hardware equipment to host your applications. The latest hardware ensures that there is no performance bottleneck that legacy hardware could cause and provides even higher reliability.

For example, NVMe is the newest standard that can meet the need for low latency, consistency, fantastic performance through IOPS, throughput, and so on, as well as less failure-prone, because there are no electro-mechanical parts; hence, NVMe can mitigate application slowdowns, system crashes, and other related performance failures commonly associated with legacy storage hardware, especially when your application loads most transactional databases. However, running applications in a data center with the latest high-performance hardware would mean everything will run smoothly, maximizing your customer experience.

– Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (or CDN) solves location limitations. It saves all of your frequently dispatched website content in best server location for worldwide, ensuring that your important information reaches your users quickly and efficiently.

CDNs are typically used for large files like images, videos, and other dynamic content. We find that, on average, 90% of a website’s traffic consists of this type of data transfer. For many clients, we’ve noticed a considerable speed-up when using a CDN with an overseas-hosted website.

– Risk Involved

There is a risk of natural disasters, and it is impossible to safeguard against this risk. Substantial natural disasters can result in long-term outages. At times a datacenter location can be situated near high proximity area. The trick is to find a way to strike the right balance between risk and proximity.

Additional information about risk factors can be found online with some research. This allows you to find the most beneficial and safest place for you and the data center.

Remember, other factors are also involved in assessing risk, some of which the data center can manage. Usually, modern data centers are equipped to maintain optimum temperatures and perfect architecture for keeping the servers safe, along with disaster management systems in place.

– Security

With the rise of AI, faster data speeds, and increasingly intelligent machines making it easier to hack into a system – large data centers are at risk. There’s more potential for data leakage now than ever before. This is why it’s essential to ensure that the data center facility you are hosted on has suitable security measures – not just digitally but also physically.

Ask your data center about video monitoring systems, granular access systems, biometric authentication, and man traps. They’re not as scary as they sound! It’s also worth checking whether they provide public records of the people accessing their system and how they protect the security of your data.

– Compliance

The internet is no longer the chaotic place it once was. Websites must follow specific procedures and rules when communicating with people using certain methods. GDPR has been a considerable concern, and some companies have made immediate adjustments, but many others have to spend time and money in preparation.

A high-quality data center can provide a safe and compliant environment, which is essential with GDPR in place. For example, they can help you track and manage your data so you know where it came from, who accessed it, and when.

Watch this video for on how to choose the best Datacenter location for your website

– Uptime

Uptime is one of the most important things to consider when analyzing the data center location. This is a representation of the time your website was online. One of the most critical factors of a website is availability. If your site is not accessible to visitors, it prevents them from gaining any understanding of your business.

Many companies claim to have 100% uptime, but this is a gimmicky number. Few data centers can meet that target. However, uptimes of over 99% are very common and achievable through redundant systems.

– MilesWeb’s global data center locations

MilesWeb is in 6 international data center locations offering state-of-the-art data centers with faster connectivity and low latency for unparalleled performance.

When you host with MilesWeb, you can choose from these data center locations:

Canada
USA
UK
India
Singapore
Australia

With MilesWeb, you get extensive geographical coverage to host near your target audience conveniently.

Conclusion

When choosing the best location for a data center, several important factors must be considered. Knowing the geographical spread of your audience is important because a data center close to them will improve the performance of your website as well as the user experience.

It also hosts several data center locations within and outside India to ensure a robust global reach. Being a prime web hosting provider, MilesWeb offers high-performance and reliable hosting services suitable for the most trustworthy hosting services that businesses need.

FAQs

1. Why is data center location considerations important for website performance?

The position of the data center web hosting location is important in the sense that it will affect both – the speed of data transmission as well as latency for websites. The shorter the distance between the data center and the targeted audience, the quicker the website opens, thus maximizing user experience.

2. How to choose data center location?

It is very essential to consider a few important factors such as proximity to the target audience, network reliability, compliance, energy efficiency, and disaster recovery systems. You will also need to consider safety measures such as SSL certificates and high-grade redundancy in the IT infrastructure to guarantee uptime and ensure data security.

3. Explain what is server response time and how it impacts website performance.

The server response period denotes the time that the server consumes to respond to any query posed by the user’s browser. In fact, it is one of the performance metrics of a website; the longer the response time from the server, the longer the subsequent loading page time, leading to a loss of visitor satisfaction and affecting the website ranking.

4. Explain different strategies that can be used to optimize my website for different geographic locations.

If you want to optimize your website for various geographic locations, then you’re required to: Use a CDN: Distributing content on servers located worldwide providing faster website content for end-users. Geotargeting: Show the contents specific to a region, i.e. language, currency. Local SEO: Use region-based keywords to optimize for local search engines. Local data centers: Data center web hosting will boost performance near your audience. Localization: Adapt your website to local languages, formats, and devices.

5. How can I ensure my website data is safe in a data center?

For assured data safety of the website in the data center, prioritize physical and network security. A robust security protocol such as 24/7 video surveillance, fire protection measures, and restricted access is what one should look for. Data should also be naturally encrypted in transit and at rest, backed up regularly, and one should apply new advanced security technology.