When choosing your hosting company (or the server where you will store your website on) it is important to keep in mind several things:

1. The Speed of the Hosting:
   • When a visitor arrives at your website, you want them to see your content instantly. The worst thing is to arrive at a website and have to wait for it to load up content. Waiting for images to appear or waiting for a flash file to load will deter your visitors – they may actually leave before your site loads up.
   • The same goes for a search engine. When a search engine comes to crawl your website for indexing in its search engine results, it wants to get your information fast. Why? Well a search engine does not have the time to wait for your pages to load – it has billions of other website pages to index and therefore needs to move on as quickly as possible. If your website takes longer than a second to load, a search engine will simply leave your site and either rank it very low in its search engine results or perhaps not even rank it at all due to the fact that it would return a poor user experience for visitors and therefore it may not be worth indexing.
2. The Location of the Hosting:
   • If your business is located in a specific country and you sell your products or service to people living withing that country it is highly recommended to also have hosting within that country. The reason for this is that the IP address (each computer has an IP address which defines where in the world it is located) of your hosting account will tell a search engine which country it is located in. If your company is located in France, you sell services to people within France, but your hosting is in China (perhaps because it is cheap),  then a search engine may look at the location of your hosting which is in China, and therefore rank it higher in China because it must be more relevant to that country, as that is where the data is stored.

When a search engine determines the ranking of your website, it does look at where your website is hosted (in which country) to determine to which people it would be the most relevant. So if your business is located in Hong Kong and sells products to Hong Kong people, then your server should also be in Hong Kong to get the highest visibility in search engines for people who are by default searching on www.google.com.hk for example.

Equally important is the speed of the hosting to ensure that your website loads quickly and returns a positive user experience both for users themselves and for search engines.