Ranking for local keyword - hosting in the same country?

Hi guys,
I trying to rank for local keyword and I'm curious just how important is where your website is hosted. What I mean - will I gain any advantage if my server is located in the country where I'm trying to rank? Why am I asking - when I search for my keyword in Bulgaria I'm on 14th place. When I search for the same keyword using US proxy I'm on 11th position and the site that usually ranks in 1st position in BG is behind my site. Also note that my server is located in NL.

Regards

Hosting not maters here. You can host anywhere. You need to get more back links from the country where you want to rank for. Also country specific domain names do better here for example .co.uk will rank good on UK search engines and .ca will rank good in canada.
Hope it helps.

Hey, hosting location gives you a slight advantage among your competitors. Also it is a good idea to visit google`s webmaster tools>Site Configuration>Settings and set it to target the users correctly. Good luck.