SiteGround, a leading web hosting provider, has announced the opening of a new data center in Madrid, Spain. This expansion follows the 2020 decision to partner with Google and start using Google Cloud for part of the SiteGround hosting infrastructure. The Madrid facility represents SiteGround’s seventh data center, joining sites in the Netherlands, Singapore, London, Sydney, Frankfurt and the United States.
The news of this opening raises the question: why is the choice of server location important?
New Data Center and CDN Location Announced June 17, 2022
“As soon as Google Cloud, on which our platform is built, announced the launch of its new Madrid region, we also began the process of adding this location to our network,” said Daniel Kanchev, Product and Technology Lead. One of the three cloud giants, Google uses a scalable and highly redundant storage system that bodes well for hosting customers under its services umbrella.
The new data center, which SiteGround announced June 17, 2022, presents opportunities for increased page load speeds and better user experience for customers whose websites see traffic from Spain. The Madrid data center location will be available to all SiteGround cloud and shared hosting customers.
Location, location, location matters
The physical location of the machine on which a website is hosted plays a role in how fast the website loads. The closer the server is to the user, the faster the website loads and the less money and energy is wasted in transmission. A website that loads quickly provides a better user experience, and page load speed directly impacts the buying decisions of nearly 70% of consumers.
So when it comes to web hosting, it’s all about location, location, location!
Faster data access and reduced networking costs
Let’s say you have a message to deliver to a friend and it needs to be delivered in person. It would be much easier to get the word out if your friend lived just down the road than if traveling to your friend’s house meant paying for a plane ticket and spending hours at the airport and on a transcontinental flight. The same applies to website data. It takes longer for site data to reach your personal computer when it resides on a server half a planet away.
“Google is known for maintaining one of the fastest and strongest networks, which means using their service will result in high speed for our customers’ websites,” said SiteGround CEO , Tenko Nikolov, when announcing the initial decision to move to Google Cloud in 2020. on The SiteGround Blog.
The physical location of a website’s hosted server directly affects the performance of the website or the loading speed of its web pages. By hosting their websites in the new Madrid location, SiteGround customers have a better chance of delivering a fast page loading experience to their locally based website visitors. And just as a plane ticket would cost more than a quick walk down the street, data centers located farther from website visitors will lead to increased expenses. By choosing a nearby data center location, website owners will minimize the cost of dealing with the data center.
Improved data protection with geographically distributed backups
The new data center also comes with a CDN site based in Madrid. With a Content Delivery Network (CDN), SiteGround keeps copies of website data replicated across four continents, ready to recover your valuable data in the event of a disaster.
In the unlikely event of a server outage, SiteGround can also leverage the Google Cloud network to offload server resources to an alternate location.
Reduction of carbon emissions
Save the most significant impact for last: Your choice of data center location has a direct impact on the carbon footprint you leave behind. Much of this responsibility falls on the owner of the data center or server itself, but consumers are advised to assess the energy efficiency commitment of any potential web hosting provider. A host that pushes for increased hardware without commenting on the location of your server itself is ignoring the environmental impact.
“There’s a tendency to fix problems by adding new hardware,” green hosting evangelist Fred Plais said in a recent post. HostingAdvice interview. Rather than upgrading your hardware, paying more for a dedicated plan, or increasing CPU allocation, customers can resolve performance issues by first reviewing their choice of data center location. Servers are often grossly underutilized, wasting up to 80% of their capacity. Therefore, adding more is not a long-term solution.
By partnering with Google Cloud, SiteGround can offer its customers a 100% renewable energy match. With Google Cloud Blog Celebrating five years of public commitment to carbon neutrality, the public cloud provider has set a “moon goal” to be 100% carbon-free by 2030.
Following the path of Google Cloud’s global expansion
Working closely with Google, SiteGround aims for growth, anticipating customer needs and pain points, and tackling them head-on. The new Madrid data center is just the latest example of SiteGround’s commitment to global expansion and a customer experience that inspires loyalty. When choosing a web host, consider advice from hosting experts and consider geography.
Luckily, when it comes to partners like Google and SiteGround, if they don’t offer a data center near you, they probably will soon!
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