Servers anywhere in the world can host your website and we know that there are some very fast servers in the USA. But there are other factors to consider.

• We have found a three day delay between delegating a doman name to a host in one country and it showing on ISPs in another country. In Australia it takes between 2 hours and overnight.
• If your main target market is USA then that's a reason to host your website in the USA. If you target Australians then they will open your website quicker if it's hosted in Australia, by a quarter of a second per page and image.
• Communications can be difficult between different time zones.
• Some USA hosts require domain names to be transferred to their registries.
• A host in USA closed down recently giving little notice to Australian clients.

Find the location of the host of any website at www.browseip.com

Test the time it takes for a data packet sent from your ISP to the host of any website. At the command prompt (or Start > Run >) type PING and the domain name or IP address. Another interesting command is TRACERT which tell how many hops a packet of data takes between your ISP and the server of a website.

We took times for the following domains hosted in Sydney, Brisbane and Florida. We are located in Newcastle, NSW and did a ping around 7:00 pm on a Sunday night. The difference between Sydney and Brisbane for us was only 15 milliseconds, but between Sydney and Florida the difference was 235 milliseconds. We tested these domains:
— platypuswebsites.com.au (Sydney)
— platypushost.com.au (Brisbane)
— barberipaullfeit.com (Florida, USA)

We therefore recommend hosting Australian websites in Australia.
 

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Saturday, 5th July 2008
Sydney, Australia