How Server Location Affects Your Website
The physical location of the server hosting your website directly impacts how fast pages load for your visitors. The greater the distance between the server and the visitor, the higher the latency (delay) in data transfer.
What Is Latency?
Latency is the time it takes for data to travel between a user's browser and your web server, measured in milliseconds (ms). Low latency means faster page loads and a better user experience.
SillyHost Server Locations
SillyHost operates servers in the following locations:
- United Kingdom (London): Ideal for websites targeting UK and European audiences.
- United States (East Coast): Suitable for websites with primarily North American visitors.
Choosing the Right Server Location
- Select a server closest to the majority of your visitors. If most of your audience is in the UK, choose our London location.
- For a global audience, choose the UK server and complement it with a CDN like Cloudflare to cache content at edge locations worldwide.
- If you serve audiences in multiple regions, a CDN becomes essential for reducing latency for all visitors.
Using a CDN to Reduce Latency
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches copies of your website's static files (images, CSS, JavaScript) on servers around the world. When a visitor requests your page, the files are served from the nearest CDN node rather than your origin server.
- Cloudflare is a popular free CDN that integrates easily with SillyHost.
- CDNs also provide DDoS protection and SSL/TLS encryption as additional benefits.
Testing Latency
You can test your server's response time using these tools:
ping yourdomain.comfrom your terminal to measure round-trip time.- Online tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Google PageSpeed Insights provide detailed performance metrics including server response time (TTFB).