Web Hosting in the USAAfter the Taiwan quakes and not having very smooth Internet access these two days, I was thinking – unless you have a very good proportion of your visitors coming in from your home country, is it ever worth hosting your site in your own country?

The issue comes with two concerns.

First, it is undeniable that USA still has the most people online

Ot has the highest market share of online users. I know things may change in the coming years, but today, a big portion of traffic on the net originates from US. So while I was able to update my blog because it was hosted locally, it makes only half-sense, because half of my visitors are from the US, and I would imagine that many of you from the other side of the world will not be able to access my blog, at least until the cables repairs are done.

Secondly, a lot of web services are based in the US.

For example, I was loading my blog in the library today, and I realised that the whole blog load well, but in the areas where my Google ads were supposed to be, what was shown was an embedded “This page could not be found” error… the blog loads, but the javascript for Google Adsense could not be executed well because that script would probably required some information from the US anyway. The same goes for other services like StatCounter. So I may have had 2 million visitors for all I know, but if the request from the StatCounter did not get through, the hits will not be logged. My StatCounter stats dropped by half these two days!

I can still check my server log though.

I’ve also had a few blog comments today, but email notifications could not be received because I’m using a Gmail account! My oh my! I must have lost a lot of mails today. Let’s hope nothing is important. Its 90% spam anyway! :mrgreen: If you have sent me an email these two days, do send it again… 3 weeks later, if it is not urgent. If not, add me on Skype and talk to me. Worst case? Snail mail! :mrgreen:

I don’t have any payment stuff done on this blog yet, but imagine, let’s say, I use Paypal and the Paypal transaction requires a request to be sent to a US server. My site would be so paralysed! I cannot transact with the locals because of the need for the request, and I can’t transact with the people in US because they won’t even be able to access my site in the first place!

So, wouldn’t it be better to find a host located in the US? At least I still get the email notifications, the hits on my logs, except maybe I will not be able to access them until the tide is over?