Does the location of the server affect the speed of the website?

Choosing a server or hosting, we often think about the location of the server room, in which the service purchased by us will be located. What is the meaning of this from the point of view of SEO, the speed of loading a page?

On many groups on Facebook or industry events you can meet the term:

If you make a website for clients from Poland, the server room must be in Poland.

Źródło: facebook.com

In the times of the Internet available through a modem, it might have made more sense. The connections were very expensive and free, so the distance to the server was important. It might have taken some time before our packets “reached” the server somewhere in Ireland.

Currently, servers located in Europe are available to us just as quickly as those from local server rooms. Yes, the differences in response will be, but at the level of several dozen or even a few milliseconds. This does not affect the feeling in the speed of service loading.

We will feel the difference only when we want to get to the server in the USA or Australia, connecting from Europe. Here, the location matters.

Therefore, if our website is to be directed to customers from the United States, it is worth thinking about a server in that location, although it is not always necessary.

When choosing a hosting company, it is worth finding out whether it is located in a small local server room, or is located in a large data center. The more important thing than the location of such a server is a few other factors:

• Internet connection – large server rooms located in Europe have more than 12 Tbps of global bandwidth as opposed to small local ones,
• redundancy of power supply, cooling, networks, etc,
• server performance – the most common bottleneck are free disks in servers. It is worth checking if the whole hosting is on SSDs and not as it is often only a database.