Anyone who knows anything about website hosting, when looking for a new hosting, usually wants to know if the company researched has servers in India or abroad. But why is it important for hosting to have servers in India or abroad? Is there any benefit to that? What is better? What’s the difference?
All questions are answered very easily and mainly very honestly if we use only strictly technical and objective criteria. Therefore, we will now analyze all the points that must be observed when answering the questions above.
What is the latency?
This is the first question that is usually associated when thinking about the geographic location of the hosting servers that you are interested in. For those who do not know, quickly and simply, latency is the time counted between your computer requesting something from the server and this server starting to return what was requested.
On average, servers in India achieve average latency times of around 60 milliseconds. The same time for servers in the US, which is where most overseas hosting servers are located, is 160 milliseconds.
The difference is much greater, that is, on average, about 100 milliseconds. But how much does that represent? A tenth of a second! And what do you do in a tenth of a second? A blink of an eye. Well, a server hosted in the USA takes an extra blink of an eye to delivering the same result as a server in India.
Therefore, latency varies according to location and the further away, theoretically, the higher the latency, since the data has to travel more ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and PTTs ( Traffic Exchange Points ), which make up the network it represents the Internet
So latency is not important?
The honest answer to this question is: it depends. Latency is a very important factor in considering where a server is located if what you have hosted on this server, it is an application with a high number of interactions with the server over time and thus, the total sum of the differences in latency, it represents an appreciable difference.
Want an example? An online game server, where multiple users play each other and the server has to update the actions of each player practically in real-time. In this or other cases where there are applications that require constant data exchanges between client and server, latency can be decisive in the fine performance.
Overseas servers don’t serve any applications?
Here again, the most appropriate answer is, it depends. Due to the example of the game server, many people are led to think that the higher latency difference in geographically more distant servers is an impediment to having applications that need performance, running on these servers. It is one of the factors, but it is not the only one.
To understand the issue, you must also know why servers are used abroad to host Indian websites. The answer is simple: you get a much more updated and better infrastructure (servers, networks, links, software, services, etc.), at a much lower cost!
When you think of hosting servers, in more than 95% of cases we are talking about shared hosting, which means that your website or application will be sharing hosting infrastructure with other websites and applications, that is, hundreds will be hosted on one server or even thousands of sites, which will dispute each other for the use of the processor, memory, link, etc.
Therefore, in order to balance costs with companies that have their servers in foreign data centres, many companies with servers in India have to place many more users on the same server. Consequence? The time you gain in latency, you lose at the other end, because the environment is overloaded. Sometimes these losses are higher than the lower latency and you can see sites in India with much lower performance than others hosted abroad.
In practical and real terms, when we think about the Internet, we are talking about something global and that goes beyond geographical boundaries and thus, most of the content we consume is coming from servers located in various parts of the planet. Some of the largest e-commerce sites we access – and which depend on speed – use servers in several countries.
Even in the example we mentioned, of game servers, what we see in practice, is that despite the latency count, some game companies prefer to keep servers in other countries, because the difference in infrastructure is so greater in other countries, that it pays off a loss with latency.
So what is better?
To answer that depends, would it seem repetitive? Yes, absolutely, but it is correct again!
Adopting a geographical criterion to choose where to host your content is a very simplistic criterion.
When doing an infrastructure survey of hosting companies with servers in India, it is not uncommon to find surprising data, such as the use of Pentium processors and even Atom, when it comes to processing and DDR3 and even DDR2 for memory used in the environment hosting, when the global standard is DDR4. If you are a layman, know that most home users have better hardware than that!
Even when talking about dedicated servers in India, it is possible to receive a proposal that highlights only the number of threads and the processor clock, without mentioning the specific processor model. Always ask for model information, to make sure that they are not providing you with obsolete equipment and consequently with inferior performance.
On the Intel website, it is possible to obtain information about processors and make comparisons between 2 or more processors and thus know your options. There are also sites that compare the performance of different processors and help you decide which company is giving you a faster option or one that suits your needs.
The truth is that you must consider a number of factors and even what answers when you ask where the servers for a particular hosting are located. Whoever does not give you more complete information and does not ask you about what you are going to host, possibly will not be being very transparent with you.
Remember to verify that you will not share the WPX hosting environment with thousands of customers, such as infrastructure, support, what technologies are used, etc. All of this helps to define the best hosting provider and is what will determine the performance of the website that you will have when accessing your data when we think about the server.
Conclusion
The geographic location of the server where you will place your data is a relevant factor in the decision, but it is not the only one. In the vast majority of cases – as is the case with institutional sites or those with little visitation – it is totally indifferent where the server is located.
The set of features and benefits of the service should be evaluated when looking for hosting. In the small number of cases where 1 tenth of a second can make a difference, make sure that the Indian server also gives you everything else that is necessary for a differentiated performance, so that a server just 1 KM from your home, it doesn’t look like it is located in the Himalayas!
