Your online presence can easily depend on you answering the question - where to host my site? You will probably do just fine with most hosting providers, or in other words - average.  Average is OK, but we can go one step further and place a solid bedrock for your online business.

Where are your visitors?

Think about where your audience is? It would be best if you made your website as easy as possible to reach by finding hosting with good access, quick to reach, and able to load website pages fast. It is good to get a local provider if you target a local group of people, and likewise, it's good to have remote hosting should you be targeting a remote location.

Check website response time.

For example, if you like to target people in Australia, you might go with a local hosting provider like www.hostingbay.com.au and run a free website test to check how fast you can access their website from Australia. This should give you a good idea of how fast people will access your site if you choose to host it on their servers. If you sign up for our free website monitoring trial, you would be able to track the performance of multiple sites round the clock and have a clear idea of where you can get the best speed.

You should really benchmark a couple of hosting providers and, of course, consider their hosting plans. Even if one provider has a 1.2 sec response time and the other has 2.3 sec, you might be better of with the second one, given that his prices and/or support are better.

Find out more with WHOIS.

Most sites have decent WHOIS records, which can be easily accessed through our WHOIS tool. The records contain basic information about the company/site owner as well as useful contact details.

Search Engine Optimization and your website

Some SEO experts give a lot of credit to local hosting and local domains  (e.g., co.uk, com.au) regarding search engine rankings. The truth is that these are some of the ways Google and other search engines try to associate your website with a given market. If you have a decent hosting offer from the US and the access time from the UK is OK, you can go with it, and it is not likely you will lose any advantage that you might have had. You can easily register a .com domain and tell Google that this domain targets the UK by simply signing in to Google Webmaster Central.

After your website has been established, website migration from one hosting company to another can cause trouble and a fair amount of downtime. Choosing carefully from the beginning can save you a lot of hassle. A quick website evaluation can save you a lot of time and trouble.