Hosting the Leading Websites:
Whereabouts of Hosting
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The physical location of a host may matter, and the host having multiple locations may help. For example, the speed of file downloads may become critical if the host’s facilities are too far from most of your visitors. People will wait roughly a second before losing patience. Or you may also want a backup host in another nation. Or, regardless of nation, you may want your primary host and your backup host to be far enough from each other and from you that a natural disaster, legal demand, or rat eating cable insulation won’t knock everything out at the same time (this is often referred to as resilience or as business continuity). Or various nations’ laws governing websites may affect a host, so you may need a host to be only in a certain nation for your legal protection. Always assume a host tries to obey the laws at all of its locations and that a host that’s in multiple nations or jurisdictions may be more vulnerable to conflicting laws, so that if you’re hosted in one nation and that host happens to have a facility in another nation then hosting your site may require compliance with both nations’ laws, and that affects you. These issues are up to you to evaluate.
Some nations are bad actors and you may not want to let your Internet connection go through them. I doubt there’s much you can do about it without spending a lot of money for your own hosting, wiring, and equipment. If you’re worried about software encryption export restrictions, legal process for seizing information going through another nation, legal jurisdiction over you because of the routing, or spying for someone else’s commercial advantage, both all of your visitors and your website host should be well inland in one large densely-populated wealthy nation with a legal environment that’s on your side, and that doesn’t leave you many choices or, in any case, much assurance. Sometimes, you can add a layer of encryption to what you send, but that is limited to an intranet or sender-recipient agreement, is potentialy expensive, and may protect only against low-intensity spying and not other concerns. Simply asking a website host about routing won’t get reliable information about that subject. The Internet was designed to get around bottlenecks and defects by being resilient in routing, and hosts likely can’t control most of that.
If geographic nearness of your hosting is one of your needs, ask the hosts you’re considering, although their answers may not be accurate and, in some cases, mainly if they outsource part of their service, the host you talk with may not even know about proximity, even if they think they do. It’s likely a host’s servers for its customers (like you) are in the same building as are their home page servers, which may be the same machines, so visit their home page and see if it loads quickly, although bad design of a home page, such as of a large and movie-filled home page, may result in slow loading and a page of legal terms may load faster. Although most of your contact with a host will be through the Internet, phone, and perhaps postal mail but probably not in person, if the whereabouts of a host’s offices or servers is important you should research your choices. There are websites that map likely distances between your computer (acting as a website visitor) and your Web host’s servers, so they might help you. To use those websites for research, you might need to know the domains of a few customers of a given website host. If you’re concerned about speed and you’re designing a website to be accessed by visitors who are far from you, especially in another nation, that kind of research may be more challenging and may need the assistance of a technically-minded person in your intended visitors’ main locale.
