There are many factors we look at when choosing a host. There are literally thousands of providers in the World and there are many, many considerations to take into account. I like to take a systematic approach and narrow down my field of possible hosting provider candidates before I even look at prices. I write down a list of criteria that I must place on choosing an appropriate website host and these form my requirements base.
1. I look at the required target audience and their geographic location – where does you target market live? And I seek to answer the question; do I want to rank more highly in a regional index rather than an International Index? For example, lets say you sell blue widgets and you are based in Melbourne, Australia. Through your website you only ship to addresses within Australia. In this situation you would ideally want to be listed more prominently in the Australian regional search indexes – like google.com.au
Why do we need to consider this? The reason is simple, the search engines will rank you more highly in a regional index if you use a hosting provider based in region or country in question. So, this is our...