Network speed and how it effects your website
Often people associate offered bandwidth with network capability. Those are in fact, two different terms.Bandwidth is associated with amount of data you can transfer (both up to your server + and down from your server) in a period of time. Network capability, on the other hand will have a direct impact on the speed of your website and quality of one enjoying your content and online media.Your search engine ranking is also affected by your network uptime and network speed. Your visitors will return if they enjoyed your website's response.
Let us look at number of factors that affect your network capabilities.
Provider is actually routing your traffic !
Network data is like a car in the traffic jam. You will take a shortcut if there's a shortcut available.If not, you just might get late for an appoitment !So, what do providers of your internet service like hosting companies and "last mile" internet providers have to offer ?Larger companies will have an psychical connections to other larger networks. They will invest in optical infrastructure to have their network connected to other larger network, and that's called peering. For example, if you have a website on one network, and your users mostly use large network like telia.com, your provider of service will route the traffic through that particular peer, and users will get response in no time.If your provider doesn't have a connectivity to telia.com, then it will route to another network that has the closes route to the desired destination, and of course, that will cause some delay.Nowadays, network providers do have a lot of "direct routes" to their fellow networks, and that will ultimately affect their quality of service, since the delay between responses will be much lower.Your provider of choice would actually be the provider that has a full redudant network, which basicly means that he has one or more routes towards an another larger network, and will offer 100% of network uptime to your website.
Your server's country can matter ! But then again ...
Your website can target a specific country more then others. So, you would normally guess that hosting your website in your country is the right choice for you. Well, you are right more or less.Having a close peer to an end-user is a good choice, and it will provide a fast response. Issue with local hosting providers is that they can have a good connectivity localy, but the amount of data transfer is somehow always limited. That's due to infrastructure that most countries don't invest in building large networks, simply because there's no primary need for that investment.On the other hand, there are a quite few professional datacenters, even though you are not in US, or maybe not in Europe, that will offer a few milliseconds delay, unnoticable to your end-users, and at the same time offer redudance (having an alternative if one route fails, which most local networks don't have), and capability to have a large amount of data transfered (again bandwidth) at low cost.
Unmetered bandwidth is so cool, but my website is slow ?!
Some providers do offer unmetered bandwdith. They are maybe slightly more expensive, or even cheaper, but in any case that sounds very good.There, of course, is a catch. Look at it as a one way street, with no semaphors, and cars trying to drive into the major highway.You can have there thousends of cars, and they will all enter the highway. Well, eventually ... though.Providers that are offering unmetered bandwidth are basicly giving false information. They are telling you that they will not measure your data. But they are mostly not telling you that you that:- you cannot use media streaming- if your website is using too much, you will get disconnected- you and hunderts of others are all having 10mbitps, but you are all sharing it.
That's basicly the story. And sometimes cheaper is costing more, costing you your website's quality, as it's directly connected with end-users pleasure enjoying all your hard work you did put in your website.