How Important is a Hosting Location? 4 Reasons You Might Want Both an EU and a US Server

If you are an international company or a business looking to expand, there are several reasons why it is important to have both a server in the United States and a server in Europe. If you are serving customers on both sides of the world, you may want to tailor the experience to the end user and provide or store different information based on their location.

Having an EU and a US server can improve speed for the end user, increase search traffic by having a geographically closer and more relevant server to your potential customers, and can help your business follow new guidelines and regulations in the industry.

Take a look at the top 4 reasons you might want both an EU and US server.

Server Speed

The speed at which your content can be accessed is important. When you are accessing a website, the packets must travel from you, through your ISP, to the server hosting the website. By having a server that’s geographically closer to your user, you can increase the speed of your website and provide faster results.

So, when a visitor in Europe accesses your site, instead of bouncing their request all the way to the US and back, they can simply be directed to the EU server that is closest to them. This can save a lot of time in the end, especially if you have large amounts of data being transferred.

Increasing your server speed lets users access information quicker, lessens any frustration that may occur when a site is loading slowly, and can help increase site trust with Google for SEO purposes. The bottom line: if you are serving visitors from all over the world, you need to utilize any techniques you can get your hands on to reduce load times and provide information faster to users.

Another way to increase speed globally is by using CDNs.

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Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

A CDN can best be described as a group of servers distributed geographically to improve load times and the distribution of content to visitors. A CDN will cache website files in multiple geographic locations so that when a visitor in Europe accesses your website, it will load cached files from the closest server to them.

This happens without having your own separate server. However, if you have a lot of users or interactive content or databases providing information, you will still want to have multiple servers geographically as the CDN will still need to pull information from your website to cache and provide results to the end users. Once you combine these two tactics, multiple servers and a CDN, your users will notice huge speed increases worldwide. Even if the user isn’t in Europe or the United States, their request will still be routed to the closest servers and CDNs to them.

This leads us to why SEO is so important to global traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There have been major changes in SEO in the past 5 years and one of the major factors that can influence your rankings is user experience. One of the main pillars of user experience is site speed. You need your website to load quickly for users, regardless of location or browser, to provide them with the best possible experience. If there are two equal websites in the search rankings that are almost identically valuable to the end user, the website that is faster will outrank the slower website. This makes it important to provide quick load times for users all over the world, which can help your bottom line and put dollars in your pocket.

By having a server both in Europe and the United States, you provide faster, more reliable access to the users across the world. In return, Google will favor your site higher in the search results pages. If you combine multiple geographic servers and CDNs, your site speed will increase and your visitors will leave happy!

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR is part of a data protection reform across Europe to secure and protect consumer data. These new regulations affect not only European businesses but companies worldwide as they have to take into account these regulations when providing and storing data for end users. One of the terms of GDPR is that all data must be gathered legally under specific conditions, and this data must be protected properly and securely.

By having both an EU and US server, you can properly separate data based on the necessary regulations. Certain ways of storing the information are fine in the United States, but if you store this type of information the same way in Europe, you may be breaking this new law. Part of the GDPR regulations involves having detailed records of all user’s personal data and how it is processed and stored. In this way, there is more accountability in the event of a security breach.

If you are doing any form of business in the European Union or have visitors coming from this part of the world, it is vital to have a separate server to handle these regulations as you do not want to cross-contaminate user information. It is important to stay up-to-date on these new laws in Europe and make sure you are abiding by them 100%.

Overview: The Benefits of Having EU and US Servers

Having multiple servers based on geographic locations can be a vital step in providing secure and fast service for your clients or visitors. If you are doing business or interacting with European users of any kind, having a separate EU server can be extremely valuable to following new international data regulations.

By having both an EU and US server, you are providing quicker and more reliable service to your visitors and this is rewarded with more visitors, higher search rankings, and information designated to the user’s locations (which brings repeat customers and word-of-mouth business).

We Offer Managed WordPress and Cloud VPS in Both the US and EU

If you are looking for an EU server, check out Liquid Web’s VPS offerings or Managed WordPress Hosting and we can get you exactly what you need.