Why UK Web Hosting Is An Essential Tool For US Based Marketers
These days there is a huge number of different providers of web hosting, and it can be a real headache to try and figure out which one to choose when it comes to setting up your websites. It is very likely that if you are living in the USA, you will probably sign up for a hosting account with one of the giant American companies. If you are still without a hosting provider and need a tip, I use Hostgator for my American hosting and have had absolutely no problems whatsoever with this no nonsense provider – so feel free to give Hostgator a go (that is my affiliate link by the way, so I’ll get a few bucks if you sign up via my recommendation. Shameless of me, I know!)
Similarly if you are based in the UK, you may well have used a British firm to host your websites. I also have a UK web hosting account, and apart from a few minor outages, they have been great, and have awesome customer service. On the odd occasion when my sites have gone down, a simple ticket to Technical Support got the problem sorted out really fast.
There is an obvious question here though. Does it really matter where I get my websites hosted? Some people are only going to set up a single blog, so they can let everybody know about their new kittens, or about a bunch of their favorite recipes or whatever. They will probably want to get their site up quickly, and feel secure working in their own currency, so they’ll be more likely to choose web hosting in the UK if that’s where they live; or maybe a different provider if they live in the USA or in France or Australia, or whatever is local for them.
The thing is, these days it isn’t any more difficult buying a web hosting account anywhere in the world, because often you can pay using Paypal, and they’ll do the currency conversion for you. So it doesn’t really matter.
For people who make a living online, internet marketers and the like, having different hosting accounts in different countries is often considered to be a great advantage. Many marketers are looking to build multiple websites, and they might choose to start a blog about a very specific topic, so that they can monetize it in some way – using Adsense or Amazon ads or Commission Junction affiliate ads perhaps. It is very beneficial to know how to pick the correct topics so that you are not fighting a losing battle against powerful competition in the search engines, and so that you will make a decent amount of money (to learn more, read my post on the Keyword Academy review).
The problems start when you begin to realise you have found a great keyword with very low competition and it looks like you might be able to make some decent money out of it. Let’s say you are US based. You have found a nice keyword, but it turns out that nobody in America has any real interest in it. Think football (aka soccer) or cricket, or products like bumbags (aka fanny packs), or nappies (aka diapers), or taps (aka faucets). The more you think about it, the more examples you can probably come up with where words for things in America are completely different in Britain. They might still be great keywords though, and you will obviously want to take advantage of them.
Enter a UK based web hosting account. Webmasters will often want to increase their chances of their sites doing well in the search engines, using the results served up by UK datacenters. It’s pointless getting to number 1 in the SERPs on an American datacenter for a keyword nobody in America is ever going to search for; while wallowing down on page 100 in the equivalent UK search results. So to try and bring relevant content to the UK’s potential market, it is important to think about some of the things that may help your site geographically. Perhaps setting up your new site on a co.uk domain name instead of a dotcom. Then there are schools of thought that say you should have your sites hosted in the UK also.
There is no question that for a British audience searching for information that you are dying to provide them, a UK web host will be faster. I have seen this myself as I am based in the UK and have both US and UK hosting. This is one of the best things you can ever do to make money online – have a site that doesn’t take an hour to load! People have short attention spans and if your US based site serves its information to Brits too slowly, they hit the back button before they even saw your ads. (Incidentally this works both ways, which is why I have hosting for both countries.)
So what are the best UK web hosting companies? I can’t answer that. I have only used one, and they suit my purposes fine, which is why I have stuck with them well into my second year. If you want to try them out they are WebhostingUK (again, another shameless affiliate link that drops a few quid in my pocket if you are happy to accept my recommendation; and I advise you to set up affiliate accounts with whoever you eventually get hosting from, as it can offset your own web hosting costs after a while!)
There is a saying in some affiliate marketing circles that “Brits don’t click”. It’s not strictly true, but many are terrified of scams and think they’ll be ripped off somehow; a case of national paranoia. However, as a US based internet marketer, you really need to know that Brits certainly will not click if your site is too slow, and with rumblings that Google’s algorithm may be set to include SERPs penalties for slow loading sites, it does make sense to at least investigate the possibility of getting yourself a fast UK web hosting account if you are picking keywords with a British flavor to them!
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