Hosting websites in Australia for overseas customers

Hi there

I have just started a webhosting business using reselling at the moment.

  1. I’m in Australia.
  2. I’m not sure if this forum allows me to tell you who I’m using as the webhost supplier, but its an Australian hosting provider.
  3. I am about to get some clients from overseas.

Two of my client’s are actually in Kenya. My question is, from an SEO perspective, or any other reason I can’t think of, is it a disadvantage for the client if I’m hosting their website in Australia? Or should they, in the Kenyan case for instance, be trying to find a webhost within their country? Are there any reasons why this would be a great disadvantage to them?

regards
David.

I know of many foreign websites hosted with American hosts on servers located in the United States, including a couple Australian sites. Google considers the physical location of the server irrelevant if it can determine a location in other ways. Google’s Webmaster Tools allows a webmaster to choose which country the website applies to for geo targeting or a country-specific tld will indicate a target market. For generic tlds like .com, the server’s location might matter a little but that can be overridden with Webmaster Tools.

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/k6po9mnpI8c/rg5G-H9ZAXkJ

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

It may possibly be more politically e,

Sent from my XT316 using Tapatalk 2

If possible, I’d check the latency/speed from a Kenyan ISP to your proposed Australian server. Kenya has fairly limited external internet backbone connectivity which might mean that if the client’s consumer base is primarily local, they may be better with a local host. While google don’t care about server location per se, they do care about page speed, so it’s worth checking performance from their primary market to the source server.

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