Do You Need Canadian Hosting?

Canadian hosting companies do exist but do you really need hosting in Canada? The answer depends on your website and what you want to achieve with it. In some cases there could be disadvantages to having your website located in Canada. In this article we look at when you might need Canadian hosting and when you would not, and where to get it.

Your web host will have a bank of physical servers which store all of the data for your websites. The internet is accessible from anywhere in the world so in this respect, it does not matter so much where these servers are located in the physical world.

Web hosting is not like a lawyer or a dentist, where obviously you need the office to be close enough for you to visit. There is no need to visit your web hosting company. So perhaps it is not so important to have Canadian hosting just because you happen to live in Canada.

Many people use web hosting services on the other side of the globe. Most of the biggest hosting companies are based in the USA. These companies are used by people in Australia, Europe and many other countries as well as people in North America.

The advantage of having US hosting is that your website will then have a US-based IP address which may make it come up higher in the search engine results that are returned to American visitors. Google and other search engines are now able to return search results depending on where the person searching is located. The USA is the biggest national user of the internet so this can be a big advantage if you just want to attract as many visitors as possible.

However, if it is important that your website attracts Canadian visitors, then you might want to have Canadian hosting. For example if your client base is entirely Canadian, you would naturally want Google to know that your website is a Canadian site.

In order to do this, you would start by having a website that ends in the letters .ca, which is the country indicator for Canada. So for example if your business is carpet cleaning with offices in Canada, you would want to get a website with a domain name something like ABCcarpetcleaning.ca.

Then you could look for Canadian hosting to host your website. Then your website would have a Canadian IP address and it would be very clear to the search engines that this was a Canadian website. Result: your site would be presented higher in the search engine results to internet users located in Canada than a US based carpet cleaning website, other things being equal.

If you want to go for web hosting services in Canada, you should know that it can be a little more expensive than the US companies. Very heavy competition keeps the prices down in the USA. However, you can still get a good deal on Canadian hosting from many companies including primehost.ca and webserve.ca.