{"id":13042,"date":"2019-05-01T03:31:30","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T07:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.knownhost.com\/blog\/?p=13042"},"modified":"2023-03-09T12:22:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T17:22:20","slug":"host-close-best-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.knownhost.com\/blog\/host-close-best-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Host Close to Your Audience for Best Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated May 1, 2019<\/h2>\n

Faster sites offer a better user experience that engages well, has more page views and ultimately sells more products.\u00a0 “Host Close<\/strong>” should be your motto as you leverage geography to host your website near the target audience location to get faster page loads and sell more stuff.\u00a0 Read on to see what 31% has to do<\/strong> with your hosting performance.<\/p>\n

Loading time is one of the biggest reasons why users abandon a page<\/a><\/strong>. In this digital age, people have too much distraction and cannot wait for a page that takes forever to load \u2013 and by forever, we mean a few seconds.\u00a0 Cheap, and poorly located, web hosting<\/a><\/strong> can massively hurt your bottom line.<\/p>\n

Web users want to get instant results when they search vacation reviews, want to pay bills on finance platforms and get to an article when they click through. But if they encounter too much friction, they will bounce off to the next option. According to a study from Google\u2019s Doubleclick, 53% of mobile users abandon a page<\/a> that takes more than three seconds to load. Sadly, more than 50% of overall website traffic comes from mobile. And when you end up losing more than half of your prospects because of slower load times, then you won\u2019t just suffer in your rankings, but also profits. That\u2019s why you always need to ensure that your load speeds are at par.<\/p>\n

Location Impacts Speed<\/b><\/h2>\n

Server location affects the speed of a website from an end user standpoint. Data travels online through a network of cables \u2013 the shorter the distance the data must travel, the faster it will take to arrive at its destination \u2013 and vice versa. With advancements in technology, it can be difficult to imagine that speed and performance of such non-physical elements are fully affected by a physical device, but in reality, the location of your servers from your end-users directly influences the final performance<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

One of the best ways to make your site faster involves having the physical location of your server near your target market. Often, the closer the site visitor is to the server, the fewer networks the data goes through. For instance, if your target audience is in the Russia and you have a US IP address and server, the data has to pass through thousands of miles of cabling, so the download speed and will be lower than if you were in the same area as your target audience.<\/p>\n

Latency is the delay before a data transfer following command for its transfer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Think of latency as that lagging pause that happens between the click and something actually appearing on your screen.\u00a0 More latency = slower loads = lower satisfaction of visitors<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Numbers<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles\/second. And for every kilometer path covered, there\u2019s a latency of 3.33microseconds. Since light travels slower in a cable, the latency is around 4.9microseconds\/km when traveling in a fiber optic cable. So, the amount of latency can quickly increase with distance. Cable issues can also interfere with the connection and add to the amount of latency incurred by the cable.\u00a0 The thing to remember is that light travelling through fiber optic cables is 31% slower than in a vacuum!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Light speed is one thing, hops is another.\u00a0 Just like Post Office, every time data (or mail) gets handed off from one central location to another, it must get sorted and redistributed, slowing it down along the way.\u00a0 Over distances, internet traffic tends to hop at major cities along the way.\u00a0 More distance = more cities = more delays = slower loads.<\/strong><\/p>\n

U<\/strong>nderstanding Speed<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Speed is how fast a media content or web page is downloaded from site hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting browser, and is dependent on a range of factors:<\/p>\n