Hosting an Irish site on a UK server

J_Wholesale · 21-02-2012 3:16pm #1

I run an Irish site with high traffic and high page loads (600k per month, traffic 95% Irish). We're looking to move the site to a managed VPS as we think it's going to grow considerably this year. I've got a number of other (non-Irish specific) sites hosted on VPS's with a UK hosting company and we're very happy with the service.

Truth is, I've hosted sites on shared hosting with most of the big Irish hosting companies, and I've never been happy with the end result - too many intermittent problems - problems I just don't seem to get with the UK host. In light of which, I wouldn't really trust any of the big name Irish companies with a managed VPS.

The Irish site I want to move is a .com domain, with Google's geo targeting set to Ireland. We're not going to change the TLD, even though we do own the .ie as well. My question is, will the site drop in google.ie's rankings if we choose a UK hosting company rather than an Irish one?

I've asked this question on other forums, and the reality is that nobody appears to know for sure. Every 'expert' has a different answer, and everyone else has a "It probably won't..." type of answer - which means they don't know.

Does anyone KNOW the answer to this question?

VMotion · 22-02-2012 1:52am

Google does know the answer indeed

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

In a nutshell: it won't if you have geotargeting specified in webmaster tools.

Hope this helps.

OneIdea · 22-02-2012 9:27am

J_Wholesale wrote: »

will the site drop in google.ie's rankings if we choose a UK hosting company rather than an Irish one?

Absolutely not, that's the whole point of GEO targeting, its your content that's sent to the end user, not the location of your server.

On a side not, I wouldn't worry about the location of a VPS server either, these days that's irrelevant.

Creamy Goodness · 22-02-2012 9:47am

OneIdea wrote: »

On a side not, I wouldn't worry about the location of a VPS server either, these days that's irrelevant.

Until you host it in like Australia or san fran where time zones will be a pain in the ass if something goes wrong negating any potential savings which most likely the driving factor to moving it overseas in the first place.

tricky D · 22-02-2012 2:32pm

OneIdea wrote: »

Absolutely not, that's the whole point of GEO targeting, its your content that's sent to the end user, not the location of your server.

Geo-targetting minimises, it does not eliminate completely. From another thread on the same subject:

Blacknight wrote: »

Network connectivity is very important.

If the host is using a cheap network or is just a reseller of a reseller of a reseller etc., then the physical location won't help with the bad connectivity

8<

Hosting an Irish site in the UK is unlikely to make a noticeable difference, but further abroad with reseller layers could.

OneIdea · 22-02-2012 2:35pm

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

Until you host it in like Australia or san fran where time zones will be a pain in the ass if something goes wrong negating any potential savings which most likely the driving factor to moving it overseas in the first place.

Just curious as to what you mean, its a Virtual Private Server were talking about, with possible 100's of sites hosted on it, if it was a Dedicated Server I guess its possible that it would take that little bit longer to sort out, maybe through support tickets or phone calls.

But a server with 100's of sites, in my opinion would get sooner notice from its customers.

My side note, was to point out that there's loads of reliable VPS server providers available around the world and personally I would consider UK servers the most expensive, so shop around. Even the likes of godaddy(not everybody's cup of tea) offer servers in the Netherlands or Spain.

OneIdea · 22-02-2012 2:42pm

tricky D wrote: »

Geo-targetting minimises, it does not eliminate completely. From another thread on the same subject:

Hosting an Irish site in the UK is unlikely to make a noticeable difference, but further abroad with reseller layers could.

I'm not denying that, and note the wording "cheap network", the OP has done his homework and I'm sure knows the difference.

But having said that, your talking about connectivity, so it only makes sense, if a site is hosted on a dodgy server, then Google wont be able to crawl the content like it should. So less will get indexed, or vise verse indexed well but visiting users wont be able to connect to the site at peak times.