Today internet is so popular and borderless, people do business worldwide and hosting company comes from many countries. As we know US company are expanding and open up data centre Indian, China, Malaysia and Singapore to capture the new growing market. Frankly speaking cost in these countries is much lower and hosting company is making good income if they offer the same rate as US counterpart. They still make good money if the offer the same price as US counterpart.

Let see the opinion from members, which country is your preferred choice and why?

hosting-horse,

Personally, I would never choose a datacenter that is in it for pure profit. I have hosted in both canada and U.S. Both companies have been very quick on the network side; however, I still would not go any fruther do to the connectivity available in the U.S. Japan maybe someday I will try.

The best thing is to host in a country where visitors are coming from. However if you have a international site I'd recommend to have it on a US server. Also one should keep in mind that Search Engines give value to geographical location for local searches, as a example if your site is in a UK server and if you move it to a US server you could experience a drop in UK SE (search Engine) visitors.

I think the US still owns the major part of the market globally... India is catching up in terms of the hosting industry, and stuff like outsourcing support,etc.

I know the topic is a few months old but I wanted to chime in here after GWH...

I have a few buddies that live in the UK - and I know there are a few active on these boards, so maybe they can confirm/deny what I'm about to say - and from what I've heard from them, anymore people are able to purchase roughly 10Mbit for about $50USD/month. Keep in mind, this is their home connection; which is just, insane when compared to our best offer here (local - Iowa) is about 5Mbit down and just under a single Mbit up, for about the same price. Crazy.

As far as which country is best, it's going to depend what region the customer is at/targeting. If they're in the UK, but the majority of their clients are in the US they'd probably want a US server, whereas a French company would want something located in France for their local market.

Well said Exon, The things to watch for is infrastructure and choices available. US is still having more choice and better infrastructure for hosting.

It completely depends upon your target audience for the reasons outlined above. If you're targeting English traffic then you'd want to look in the US, UK or CA for your hosting. If you're targeting Asian traffic then you would want to look there. Connections these days are great even when it comes to transcontinental connections but speed is still the best when the DC is closer to you. This is, of course, assuming that the actual DC's have similar makeups in lines and hardware.

No offense intended to the other markets, but it's still realistic to conclude the servers hosted in the US, UK, CA and some of the other more developed countries are still the "better" option for people from those countries and even in many other countries. The infrastructure is just a little more reliable.

That would make sense - compare the size of our respective countries. Especially when you're talking about Iowa and South Carolina in our case.

Someone told me one that Us companies are the best service providers becaue american consumers complain more than others. Well I consider that as a joke however I can really say that US companies are at the top. I do not mean big corporations. Most of them are too bureaucratic and answer to customers within 24 hours or even more.

cheers

I also believe that target audience's geographical location is important. But more important is the internet connection of the hosting provider. If your hosting company's internet connection is slow or has low uptime, it will affect your web site's dramatically.

It's best practice to search for a few hosts present in the location of your target audience and request for reviews on these hosts at hosting related forums in order to check their service quality and uptime rates.

the US is pretty good, UK/western Europe, and Australia

Wow!

That is true I think. I use to have my US information related site hosted on a UK server and it also showed up in the UK search engine results on Google.

I then needed to get a dedicated server and went for a US server and a month of so later I didn't have my site showing up in any of the UK results every again. I only have it in the Worldwide search results.

Easy any free-market economy country. And long history of such. United States is bare-none the best, however, be sure its actual in the United States.

I would pick Sweden, cause lots of customers I have found live around there... but for anyplace else, i would say USA ;P

I think the US is still the best. Maybe some more after that like eur. or the UK.

US is best for me too in terms of pricing and internet connection speed.