hosting?

Sort of yes, but it’s not really as important as it seems.

The shorter the line, the faster the load, but only by a few milliseconds. If your site were hosted in the UK, and you are in the UK, your site would load a millisecond or two faster for you than it would if it were hosted in the USA.

With that said, the web is a world-wide thing. What your UK visitors gain in speed by moving the hosting to the UK, your USA visitors will lose, and similar across the globe.

What I mean to say by all this is that you should go with the hosting provider you like, not just the one that’s close to you, because your audience can be global and not just local. What benefits one locale, won’t benefit another, so it’s really not that important.

If the benefits of a local server are still of interest to you, add a cloud proxy like https://www.cloudflare.com/ on top of your preferred hosting service.

Yes, it is true. It will give you a very small speed advantage. The biggest reason for doing this is if you have a .co.uk (or other .uk) domain as Google does tend to rank country-specfic sites slightly higher if they are hosted in that country.

BUT… it all comes down to the price. I’ve seen with my own country that hosting here is at least twice as expensive as it is in the US, so I have some that I don’t host here. But I do still host the most important ones in the “correct” country.

Many thanks for your response. I will take what you said on board. Great thank you. As it is for a client i guess I had better go to a UK for Hosting.
So now to choose a UK hosting. Any recommendations? I always seem to have had problems with 1and 1.

Please don’t ask for hosting recommendations. Your thread will get closed as soon as the moderators see it. ?? Asking for hosting suggestions does nothing more then generate 100’s of “Host here!” comments from SPAM’ers trying to pimp their own (normally bad) services.

Oh dear ! Of course I quite understand.