Should a SA website be hosted in SA?

E

eddyport

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Hi all
Like to find out the general.consensus on whether it's better from an seo, speed point of view to host a website built in South Africa locally or on an international server.
Look forward to your comments
Thanks Ed
 
Really not any significant difference.

The only things that need to be local are services/systems/software with low latency requirements. Like voip or gaming.
 
If your target audience is South Africa you should host locally. It will make no difference from a SEO point of view but it will make a substantial difference from a speed point of view.

If the site is operated for a business, consider the legal aspects and you are better off hosting locally - especially now with POPI, CPA and privacy aspects. Also consider international outages which happens frequently - your site will be inaccessible to local users.
 
eddyport said:
How would the new privacy laws impact on the local hosting?
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They could shut your site down straight unlike other countries where law enforcement would have to try get a court order in that country for anything serious.

It's like putting your money in another country so Zuma cant take it..
 
Yeh, from an SEO perspective it literally makes zero difference. If the domain is not co.za, then set the geo-targeting in Webmaster Tools to "South Africa".
Personally, I'd almost certainly host it in Europe. Fast access speeds to SA, more reliable data centers, further from Zuma (as mentioned above).
People who might be limited to local-only are very very few and far between. Wouldn't concern myself with them.
 
to answer your question
"speed point of view" yes - less hops = lower latency = faster response times.
Do your homework, and then support local.
 
Google keeps website speed into account and can "penalize" as website somewhat if it's too slow. And Google knows about geolocation so it keeps this in mind when it calculated website speed. Faster website will rank better on google searches.
 
One advantage of local is that the site is still accessible during the inevitable monthly SEACOM outages which cut off about half of ISP's from the outside world.
 
Most people host international and are more than happy with it. You dont get penalized at all. Speeds are good and you get more value for your money if you host internationally.

I suppose if you are only catering for the tiny South African market and are not looking at the international market for clients, or if you really need low latency, hosting local might sometimes be a better option.
 
TJ99 said:
One advantage of local is that the site is still accessible during the inevitable monthly SEACOM outages which cut off about half of ISP's from the outside world.
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What ISP are you with? I have MTN data and IS data that have not gone down (international link) in the last year :confused: (They have redundancy) The local data centers go down way more often than the international links.
 
IMO it doesn't matter. Use wootware as an example, they are a fairly high volume ecommerce store hosted in the US and I have never had performance issues using their site. Their Google raking is also very good...

If you have a crap host locally your scripts and overall experience will be far worse the having a high quality international host.
 
ghoti said:
What ISP are you with? I have MTN data and IS data that have not gone down (international link) in the last year :confused: (They have redundancy) The local data centers go down way more often than the international links.
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I WAS with MWEB. Fortunately that changed in the last few months, but when SEACOM went down, things like Youtube, Gmail, international forums etc were completely inaccessible, MyBroadband and other local sites were not affected.
 
TJ99 said:
I WAS with MWEB. Fortunately that changed in the last few months, but when SEACOM went down, things like Youtube, Gmail, international forums etc were completely inaccessible, MyBroadband and other local sites were not affected.
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From my own personal experience, local datacenters typically experience more downtime than the pipelines do.
 
I use both local and international. Both have certain advantages that caters for specific needs. Mostly though international is better but local is getting there , the pricing for a re-seller account has dropped significantly in the last few years.
 
Just a quickie , who do you guys use international and where do you host ? I host mostly in the US but I wanna move to the UK ? Any suggestions or advice ?
 
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