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Archive for the ‘website speed’ tag

Server Location: Why it’s important for your business   no comments

Posted at Jan 26, 2023 @ 9:00am dedicated servers

What is server location

Server location refers to the physical location of a server. It can be termed as a place where the server is hosted, and the data is stored on those servers. A server or servers are located in a data center, or a co-location facility, or if a corporation is big enough, it can afford to have its server room.Server location refers to the physical location of a server. It can be termed as a place where the server is hosted, and the data is stored on those servers. A server or servers are located in a data center, or a co-location facility, or if a corporation is big enough, it can afford to have its server room.

Importance of server location

Choosing a server location is an important factor if you are conscious of the performance, accessibility, compliance, and especially the cost of a server. The location of a server can have a significant impact on how well it performs, how easily it can be accessed, and how much it will cost to host. There are many other factors when choosing a server location, and one by one they are discussed below.

Latency

Latency is the amount of time it takes for data to travel between the server and the user. The closer the server is to the users, the lower the latency will be. This is especially important for applications that require real-time data, such as online gaming or video conferencing, social media applications, maps, and live streaming. Low latency ensures that users can access the data they need quickly and with minimal delay, which improves the overall user experience and satisfaction.

Bandwidth

The available bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted to and from the server. A server located in a region with better connectivity will have access to more bandwidth. This is important for applications that require large amounts of data to be transferred, such as streaming services or online backups, social media applications, and online games.

Data sovereignty

Some countries are very strict when it comes to data, and they even have enacted laws. The European Parliament has defined data sovereignty as “Europe’s ability to act independently in the digital world”. Therefore, many countries require data to be stored within the very country’s borders. In such cases, the server location should comply with the data laws prevalent in that country. Data sovereignty is a complex issue, and businesses must ensure that they comply with the laws of each country where their data is stored.

Power reliability

Power reliability is an important factor to consider when choosing a server location. Some locations may have more reliable power supplies than others. There are some countries with enough power supplies that even have attracted big corporations to set up servers in their country. Servers rely heavily on power as they need to be running 24/7. A server located in an area with a reliable power supply is less likely to experience downtime due to power outages

Natural disasters

Natural disasters should also be a factor when choosing a server location. Some locations are more prone to natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, while some are not. It all depends on the geography and topography of that location This can affect the availability of the server. For example, a server located in an area prone to hurricanes may experience downtime during a storm, which can put people in even double trouble as they can face difficulty in connecting with loved ones and friends.

Climate

Climate is another factor to consider when choosing a server location. Temperature and humidity can have a direct impact on the hardware and cooling of a server. A server located in a region with a cooler climate will have less stress on the cooling system, which can help to improve the lifespan of the hardware. Therefore, most of the biggest servers are located in countries where the temperature is cold or moderate as it also reduces the cost of cooling down the servers.

Cost

Cost is another important factor to consider when choosing a server location. The cost of hosting a server in a particular location varies in terms of logistics and operational costs. Some countries see server locations as less environment friendly whereas some countries welcome them to lure investment. Combining this with the temperature factor, and lower costs for electricity and cooling can help to reduce the overall cost of hosting a server.

Overall, server location is an important consideration when it comes to the performance, accessibility, compliance, and cost of a server. Businesses must consider factors such as latency, data sovereignty, bandwidth, power reliability, natural disasters, climate, and cost when choosing a server location. By carefully considering these factors, businesses can ensure that they choose a location that best meets the needs of their users and their business.

How server location impact websites

Server location can have implications for the website, no matter what sort of website you are running. There are ways where server location affects your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines use the geographic location of the server to determine the relevance of a website for specific geographic regions. If your website’s server is located in the same country as the majority of its visitors, it is considered by the traffic engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo to be more relevant for that country and may rank higher in search results.

Website Speed

The distance between the server and the users accessing the website can affect the latency, which is the amount of time it takes for data to travel between the server and the user. The closer the server is to the users, the lower the latency will be. This can result in faster loading times and a better user experience for the website’s visitors.

DDoS attack

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) overwhelms a server or website with traffic from several sources to render it unavailable. The attack can be lessened, and the website kept online by placing the server in a location with superior DDoS defenses.

Conclusion

Server location can have a significant impact on the performance and accessibility of a website. Factors such as latency, SEO, legal compliance, DDoS attack, and backup/disaster recovery should be considered when choosing a server location. Choosing the right server location can help to improve the user experience.

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Written by admin on January 26th, 2023

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Why Website Speed Matters   no comments

Posted at Apr 5, 2022 @ 8:00am Web hosting

If you’re in a store and ready to check out but you can’t find someone to help you, chances are you’ll stick around. You may even wait quite a while since you’ve gone through all the trouble of going to a store and selecting which items you want. However, if you’re waiting a long time for a website to respond, you can be on another site making the same selections within seconds.

For this reason, it’s essential that your website runs quickly and loads within mere seconds. People have a large selection of websites that they can get information from or do business with, and you need to be sure that your site is providing what people want very quickly. Additionally, it’s not just sites that sell items that need speedy load times. Sites that generate revenue from ads also need to load quickly to prevent the loss of income.

Importance of Website Performance and Speed 

It is important to understand that today’s customer is always online. This means that if they want to access information online, they will do it through multiple devices. Speed is an integral part of the user experience. This blog details the top reasons why website speed is important and why it is essential to optimize website speed. 

It Can Lower Your Conversion Rate

Studies show that people are steadily becoming less patient when it comes to waiting for web pages to load; 47 percent of people expect a website to load in two seconds or less. For mobile sites, you are given about three seconds before more than half of the visitors say they will leave. Even if you’re getting people to stick around, a slow load time can drop your conversion rate.

A study done by Amazon showed that just a 0.1 second slower load time resulted in a one percent decrease in sales. While Amazon is enormous and your website may not be able to generate that much traffic or sales, it shows that even tiny slowdowns can still have a tangible effect on your business. If slow load speeds are driving people away, then it’s driving your sales away. 

Search Engine Ranking

If you run a business website, you’re probably at least familiar with the concept of search engine optimization, which involves signaling to search engines that people who are searching for particular terms or phrases would benefit from visiting your site. Google, and other search engines, include user experience as a metric when determining where your website will end up in search engine results. 

User experience includes several things, including the quality of content on a site, if it’s easy to navigate and how quickly the website loads. Google doesn’t generally release specific information about how metrics are weighted, but a slow website can dramatically reduce your user experience score. With SEO being so competitive, the last thing you want is a slow website dragging your ranking down. 

User Experience

One of the reasons that user experience is a part of many search engine ranking metrics is because people tend to not return to websites that worked poorly for them. Research done by Statista indicates that almost 80% of shoppers will abandon an online shopping cart if the website is too difficult to use. 

Having a slow website can also make visitors do more than just wait. It can also keep certain parts of your site from working because scripts still need to load. Someone may fill out a form or attempt to add an item to a shopping cart and get an error or find that nothing is happening. 

Additionally, when a website is slow, it may not load properly or things on the page may start adjusting themselves, changing the locations of images and text as people are trying to read or use the site. These types of frustrations can easily send someone away from your site with a commitment to never return. 

The Need for Speed on Mobile

Mobile users can be even more impatient than people on desktops. With the number of individuals using mobile devices to both surf the web and make purchases, you mustn’t be driving away customers and visitors with a slow site. In addition to needing to create mobile and desktop versions of your site, you need to be sure that mobile versions load quickly and aren’t just designed to fit on a smaller screen. 

People on mobile devices often have data caps, and although powerful, smartphones have far less processing power than computers. Images need to be shrunk in terms of both pixels and file sizes, and scripts need to be kept down to the minimum required for the site to function. Along with rating user experience for desktop websites, Google also measures user experience for mobile sites. Furthermore, in the last year, they’ve started ranking mobile-friendly sites higher when people do searches on a mobile device. 

Loss of Ad Revenue

Depending on the ad network that your website is hosting advertising from, you may only get credit for ad views if the ad loads properly if the visitor to the page has the ad show up on their screen, or both. If your website is very slow, ads may not be loading properly, depriving you of revenue. Google found that 25 percent of mobile sites with load times under five seconds had higher ad revenue. 

Resolving Your Speed Problems

Whether you have a slow site or would just like your site to run faster than it already is, one of the first things you should look at is cutting down on scripts and reducing the size of image and media files. Scripts can slow down even a bare-bones site because they use a server’s bandwidth, processing power from the server, and processing power from the computer they are being loaded on. Unless your site – and the page that someone is on – needs a script or function to run, consider ditching it. 

Media files can also dramatically increase the amount of time that it takes for a site to load. Instead of eliminating image files, see if you can’t compress them or use another file type that results in a smaller image. A small loss in image quality can cut an image’s file size in half. 

Another consideration is the server or hosting provider you’re using. You may need more bandwidth or processing power, and if you’re using shared hosting, it may be time to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server solution.
 

Speed matters. It affects your user experience; it affects your search ranking. It affects your sales and conversions.  Follow Us : Facebooktwitterlinkedinyoutubeinstagram
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Written by David Maurer on April 5th, 2022

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How Website Speed Affects Your Business   no comments

Posted at May 15, 2018 @ 9:57am Web hosting

Website Speed Affects Business

If you’ve ever waited for a slow website to load, you know how frustrating it is. It only takes a few seconds – if that – for you to start getting impatient and considering going to another site.

Visitors to your site feel the exact same way. People have grown increasingly accustomed to instant results, and most web users expect web pages to show up on their screen right after clicking or tapping. A slow website can directly, and negatively, impact your sales and ability to draw in new clients.

However, it’s not just sales that take a hit when your website is crawling. Slow load times can result in reduced search engine rankings and depressed conversion rates. Additionally, a slow website is often the sign of a design problem, which may mean that you’re using more bandwidth to do less.

 

The Five Second Rule

According to a recent study, one-third of online shoppers will leave your site if it takes more than five seconds to load. Along with the fact that five seconds is a very short amount of time to work with, the study found that people are getting more impatient; a previous study showed that you had six seconds before people left.

If that weren’t bad enough, a study done by Google that specifically looked at mobile users found that these individuals are even more impatient. More than half of those involved in the study will leave a mobile website if it doesn’t load in three seconds.

What this means is that your website design needs to focus on speed instead of design elements. To ensure that people will go to your website – and stay – your site needs to be fast and streamlined.

 

Load Time Affects Sales

If you’ve got your website loading under five seconds, you may get visitors to stick around, but it won’t necessarily net you a sale. The study that found many people will leave after five seconds also determined that a 2.4 second load time led to the highest conversion rates. This is backed up by data collected by Kissmetrics, which showed that a one second delay in website response time can lead to a seven percent conversion rate drop.

The collected data also showed that people who made purchases from a site but were unhappy with the site’s performance were less likely to buy from the site again. In other words, the bare minimum to get someone to stay may be five seconds, but if you want to make a sale, and keep making sales, your site may need to load even faster.

 

Google Is Impatient Too

Load times don’t just affect whether or not a potential customer stays on your website. They may also play a part in determining if someone ever arrives at your site. This is because Google looks at user experience when calculating search engine rankings.

There are a number of factors that go into user experience, but load time is a significant one. Search engine ranking is very competitive since it determines where your site shows up in search results and if it shows up on the first page. With less than 80 percent of people clicking to the second page of search results, it’s essential that you’re doing everything you can to be on page one.

Google offers a website to check your site’s performance, and according to the search engine, a score of 85 or higher out of 100 means that your site is doing well. Anything below that likely spells trouble when it comes to your search engine rankings.

It’s also important to note that Google has started to give websites that are mobile friendly higher rankings when people do a search from a mobile device. If you have a desktop site that loads quickly but don’t create an equivalent mobile site, you could see a drop in your mobile search rankings.

 

Slow Load Times Could Mean Back End Problems

There are a variety of reasons that your website may be running slowly or simply not loading as quickly as visitors would like. Many common reasons relate to design, such as running too many scripts or filling up the page with large media files.

These problems can be resolved easily by streamlining a website and cutting down on files and scripts that bog the loading process down. Doing this may help to improve the performance of your web server as well. If the media files on your site that are taking up enormous amounts of bandwidth are compressed or if you reduce the number that load on your site, you could see a lot of resources freed up.

 

It May Be Time To Upgrade

However, slow load times, especially if you have optimized your website, may indicate that there’s a larger problem with your server or the network you’re running on. If you are hosting on a Shared Server, it could be that you need more power and system resources. To resolve this, it is recommended that you upgrade to a VPS/Cloud Server or Dedicated Server solution. If your business is utilizing a Colocation solution but still experiencing bandwidth and network issues, it may be time to change your Data Center and/or Cloud provider.

While attractive and innovative website designs may be appealing, if you’re in the business of selling, your focus should be on a website that loads quickly and is easy to navigate. Shaving just a second off of the load time of your site and pages within it could mean a dramatic difference in conversion rates and sales, and it could also improve your search engine rankings.

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Written by David Maurer on May 15th, 2018

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3 Ways to Speed Up Your Website   no comments

Posted at Mar 6, 2018 @ 10:06am Web hosting

Website Speed Loading

Many online business owners make the mistake of overlooking the importance of having a fast website. When you want to get the most from your online presence, the loading speed of your content is one of the most important factors to your success. Your prospects have a lot of distractions fighting for their attention, and you must compete with their friends, family and other advertisers if you want to make any progress.

Web users don’t have much tolerance for slow websites, and most will navigate away if your content takes longer than a few seconds to appear on the screen. So every step that you take to increase your website’s performance will help you attract and retain customers, and you are about to learn how to get moving down the right path.

 

1. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

One of the benefits of working online is that you can reach a worldwide audience, and doing so is one of the best ways to enhance your profitability. But when someone downloads your content or accesses your website, the speed at which the content loads will depend on that person’s location. For example, if your hosting server is located in New York, someone who lives in China will encounter delays when trying to access your website.

If your prospects are forced to wait too long, they will often opt to find a local business that can offer them efficient download speeds. You can overcome that problem by using a content delivery network, or CDN. When you have a CDN, your content is stored on several servers around the world. When someone accesses your website or tries to download a file, the CDN will send the files to them from the server that is closest to that person’s location.

 

2. Check Your Plugins

You can find many plugins or scripts that will help you captivate and engage your audience, but using too many of them can decrease the loading speed of your website. If you want to speed it up, take a look at each plugin to determine if you need it and how much it is impacting your site. Disable one plugin at a time to determine if the changes make a difference in the amount of time that it takes for your content to load. If one of your plugins is causing a lot of harm, consider removing it, but you can also check to see if the developer has released any updates.

 

3. Upgrade Your Cloud or Web Hosting

If you have tried everything of which you can think to improve your loading speed, then you might want to take a look at your cloud or web hosting provider. If you have a basic plan, then you might not have access to the amount of bandwidth and resources that you need to improve the speed with which your audience can access your content.

If your web hosting plan is the source of the problem, then you might want to upgrade to a better provider. Although you likely wish to avoid spending more money than needed, the enhanced speed of an effective hosting plan is an investment that will pay for itself over time.

Those who don’t take steps to optimize their website’s loading speed are likely losing more customers than they realize, and you don’t want to repeat the same mistake. Putting in a little effort can go a long way when it comes to keeping your prospects engaged and focused on what you have to say. Optimizing your website is a good place to start when you want to make your content load with enhanced efficiency. But if that step does not help, then upgrading your hosting plan is sure to get the job done.

When your website loads quickly, your customers’ experience will not be interrupted, and they will be that much more likely to make a purchase as a result. The speed with which your content loads is also a reflection of you and your products. When you prevent delays, you are also showing your customers that you care about your reputation, and you will start to earn their respect.

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Written by David Maurer on March 6th, 2018

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Why Website Speed Matters (Infographic)   no comments

Posted at May 23, 2017 @ 9:36am Infographics,Web hosting

Click Here to see just how fast your website can be with TurnKey Internet! – FIRST MONTH FREE!

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Why Website Speed Matters - Infographic

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Click Here to see just how fast your website can be with TurnKey Internet! – FIRST MONTH FREE!

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Written by David Maurer on May 23rd, 2017

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