local buisness and web hosting

I currentlly have some services I'd like to advertise to my local community. Ive been stuck on deciding which web hosting to use. According to what ive read if you have a local business, its better to find a hosting server closer to your location for better rankings on google. Because when a seacher seaches for you on google, google doesnt have to go through so many steps, page speed, etc........Ive been so frustrated with this. if I live in tampa does that mean I must find a web hosting company in tampa? or does it just need to be in the US. Or may I use hostgator or godaddy? I never thought choosing web hosting would be so hard. plz help


plzzz read ...........Server location: tightly related to the above one, this one is important to mention for a number of reasons. For us the most important reason is that Google considers the server ?physical? location when ranking a website in both local and general search (for location-specific searches). So if you are creating a website for your local business and expect people to search it by location, find the hosting provider nearby.

It has been said many times that local server hosting does not really affect one in ranking. You can also state in the webmaster tool which location of targeted audience you preferred for your site. But one thing for sure is that the speed of loading will of course be faster when local visitors vvisiting your site.

What makes an impact on local business rankings is a verified business.

1.) Register the business address with Google to get it on Google Maps
2.) Put the same business name and full address at the bottom of each page or on a "contact" page that is linked from each page.
3.) Get the business into free yelp, yellow pages, etc.
4.) Get citations on authoritative resources with your business name and address.

As for hosting:

1.) Location may not be very important, but you should probably host it within the same country or continent. Hosting a site in China for a Colorado, USA business location would be retarded. Picking a host in Florida vs. Chicago however has no bearing.
2.) A CDN doesn't hurt. I like Amazon Cloudfront as it's pay-as-you-go and for a tiny little local company it would not cost more than a buck a month. CloudFlare is free but adds 500ms+ latency to your site so be careful, you could increase the load times not reduce them.
3.) To expand on #2, if the website is VERY slow it might have an impact on rankings. Especially if the website goes down a lot. Just pick a host that has a RECORD of 99.9+% uptime within your country.
4.) The best thing you can do for performance is a properly optimized website. Little to no images, clean HTML and CSS, very tiny code.

Please don't stress about server location when you have so much other things to worry about. Server location really doesn't matter. The rest of the pointers are mentioned by the guys above me.

hosting location not counted in ranking factor so no matter what location you use.

As mentioned before, in Google Webmaster tools you can specify the location of your audience.
You should go after a web hosting that has positive reviews with a good loading time. (SSD drives would help, PHP 7 as well)

Any hosting in the US would work.

For local business you want to make sure you have your site listed in Yelp, city search, yellow pages and so on

David Jones said:

hosting location not counted in ranking factor so no matter what location you use.

Click to expand...

David Jones said:

hosting location not counted in ranking factor so no matter what location you use.

Click to expand...

But loading times are a factor. It's simply a good thing to have your site hosted closer to your audience in order to provide best experience/loading time.