Does it matter if a UK targeted site is hosted in the US?

[MarkCo]

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1: So you saying they have two datacentres one the uk and the other in the usa?

2: Will you be still paying the same monthly fee (£££) if you move the site over the USA?

Yes, my host is very good, always on call to fix and problems or help me out. As I say the datacentre in the UK was not handling the very large traffic of one of my sites, so I moved it to a US server (same host) for the same price. I use both UK and US servers.

[zaq]

[QUOTE=Paul Smith;319452]I think if your even paranoid about it for one minute then host it in the UK.QUOTE]

lol Paul nice use of words paranoid

i think the "load time" is more important then being listed on google, as MarkCo said his site is very very popular so every sec counts, so i think if the site is aimed at the uk market its in MarkCo and his visitors best interest to have the site hosted in the UK.

Looks like to me the hosting company is looking to save themselves money by moving the data to the USA if MarkCo still pays the same rate if they do.

[zaq]

Yes, my host is very good, always on call to fix and problems or help me out. As I say the datacentre in the UK was not handling the very large traffic of one of my sites, so I moved it to a US server (same host) for the same price. I use both UK and US servers.

So they are saving themselves money hosting it in the USA and changing you the same fee (£££££) .As you said MarkCo its a very very popular it should be all in the UK.

[cclapper]

I found this thread from webmasterworld (5 years old!) and they are discussing what proportion of users uses "Uk Results" vs "Web" . But it seems everyone has different experiences so its hard to jump to any conclusions.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum7/732.htm

Looks like I will have to consider moving to the UK hosting without backing it up with any stats.

[MarkCo]

Well I host more several sites with this host, some are now on the UK half dedicated server and the biggest one we have moved to a server with hardly any other site on it in the US.

I don't think the host is saving himself money by doing this? and not being so honest with me about the reasons for moving to a US server?

The problem after all was the UK datacentre not handling more than 2gb a second, the server was holding up fine.

I was told the US datacentre could handle this no problem?

Advice please...

[zaq]

MarkCo its always about money, like you said you moved the biggest one to the USA so with the weak dollar it makes business sense to them to move it to the USA as they are paying the bandwidth and running cost of that server in $$$$ etc

Exchange Rate: £1.00 = $1.98

But you are still paying them in ££££ when it should be in $$$$$ or they should be pasting the saving on to you and not themselves.

[BFG 9000]

Has anyone got any examples of .co.uk sites (hosted in USA) that are listed in google uk even when the 'pages from the UK' option is checked?

[tbp]

Has anyone got any examples of .co.uk sites (hosted in USA) that are listed in google uk even when the 'pages from the UK' option is checked?

I can confirm that .co.uk's are fine. My server is in the states, so I only use .co.uk names, and all of them appear in google, even when the "pages from the UK" option is selected.

Just don't use .com's or you`ll be blocked form the UK results. A .co.uk domain name is obviously targetted at the UK market so its included.

[DioBach]

Ditto. the tricky one is to get a US based .com to show in the UK only listings.

[cat]

Geotargeting from Yahoo has in my experience has been very poor.
If you have .co.uk domain located outside the UK have a look at search results between
search.yahoo.com and uk.search.yahoo.com.
Google seems to have no problems, but I would still locate in the UK for other reasons.

[tbp]

I don't have any problems with Yahoo, again .co.uk's hosted in the states are fine. Currently my domains are getting better traffic from yahoo than google. MSN is fine too.

[BFG 9000]

I can confirm that .co.uk's are fine. My server is in the states, so I only use .co.uk names, and all of them appear in google, even when the "pages from the UK" option is selected.

Just don't use .com's or you`ll be blocked form the UK results. A .co.uk domain name is obviously targetted at the UK market so its included.

Do you have any examples I could look at?

[Donk]

I'm trying out an experiment to try and get round this problem.

Most of my sites are hosted in the states but for a couple of my sites I've set up a uk. subdomain which is just a landing page on a uk server.

So www.mysite.com is in the states but uk.mysite.com is hosted in the uk. As the UK site is merely an entry page (linked to the MySql Server in the States) I can get quite a few sites on a fairly small uk server that allows "infinite" add-on domains.

I must admit setting up the DNS was a bit tricky.