Does it make sense to host your site outside the US?
After 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! 
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!
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?
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Tan Kian Ann is blog marketing coach based in Singapore. He is passionate in helping individuals and small businesses reach out to the world using blogs. 
December 29th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Visit John
I guess this is a wake up call for most of us that nothing is 100% reliable at time. This may be a good thing on the other side as country will take note of this issue and will plan for a backup if this happen again in the future.
So we may suffer a while but on the other side is may be good. As for whether we should host in US or not. I would prefer to host with US as I found that US server are most reliable and provide better feature and customer service. There a few times I host in Singapore, the server was down for 5 days. Can you imagine it.
It may be cheaper to host in Singapore but the price you pay to host in US I guess do worth it. This is how I feel.
John Tan
December 29th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Visit Kian Ann
Actually, I wouldn’t agree totally that it is always more reliable to host in the US. From my own experience, the US hosting company I used was much much worse! Heh! But I think it all boils down to the point of how much you pay - if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!
The bottomline is if the website means a lot to you, it pays to get it hosted on a good server (which may cost you a little more)
BTW, I’ve heard of a couple of popular names for hosting - like HostGator, DreamHost, and BlueHost… any others to recommend?
December 29th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Visit Mike
GoDaddy.com are joining with Google :D, so i think you will find that will be the best place.
I host my sites in England as I can’t see any natural disasters causing my site to go down as England has very little, and plus its cheaper :D.
December 29th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Visit Kian Ann
Thanks Mike - the GoDaddy/Google duo sounds great. But does Google provide hosting services? Pardon my ignorance, I haven’t heard of Google doing webhosting… they are giving away so much for free but not selling!
December 29th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
Visit Mike
Some more information for you. I haven’t read much into it but they do sell a lot of things google earth pro, sketchup pro they have loads of crap out their.
Mike: I edited your comment so the URL doesn’t poke out of the design
December 29th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Visit Kian Ann
Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.
Yesterday I went on and got a HostGator account - the first month of 10GB of space for 1 cent! Haha.. want to find out how?
December 29th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Visit Mike
LOL how?
December 29th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Visit Kian Ann
Heh… the 100GB shared plan costs $9.95. (It wasn’t 10GB! I counted the zeros wrongly ;))
When you register, they will ask you if you have a coupon code. Google “hostgator coupon code”, and you will find lots of sites with coupon codes - from forums to blogs to … everything!
Just use any of them, and you get $9.94 off!
So much for price discrimination. ;P
December 29th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Visit Mike
I’m considering changing host now :p, coupon code
December 29th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Visit Kian Ann
Hah.. but that’s for the first month only though.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Visit Mike
You should look for yearly plans, my current hosting I pay £50 a year for 20gb bandwidth 1gb web space 4uhosting.co.uk.
December 30th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Visit Kian Ann
Well, two side of a story - get one month to see how good the thing is first, and then if you like it you can always upgrade later.
Of course, unless you get very deep discounts for a year plan, or you are recommended by a friend.