Importance of Domain Name Extension and Hosting Servers

I have come across many webmasters who really do not care about domain name extensions and the hosting servers. Many webmasters decide to go with a .info domain while many other stick to other free and cheap domain names. I have written a post on how to do a research and choose a product and target audience for your website. This can be done for any website, whether you are selling a product on your website or no.

Importance of Domain Name Extension or TLD – Many websites on the targeted to the entire world but there are few websites and businesses who have content/services/products related to a particular country. For e.g. When you have a Bollywood website, it is obvious that most of your website visitors will be from India. Hosting such a website on a co.in or .in domain is a very good idea. This helps the search engines to figure out your target audience and rank your site appropriately. People doing a Google search from India get redirected to google.co.in which will rank a .in or .co.in higher. Similarly, a website targeted to Canadian audience should use the .ca extension while a website targeted to UK audience should use a .co.uk TLD.

Importance of Hosting Server – Almost all hosting services are same nowadays. They all provide almost similar services at same cost. In such a scenario, we end up buying web space or a server on the most famous one. My favorite here is Host Gator. Lot of webmasters do this without thinking about the geographical location of the server. Most of the servers and located in the United States and it would be a good choice to host your website on a server located in the United States if your target audience is in the United States. However, what if your website is for people in Australia? Maybe you are selling a product which the Australians buy maximum. In this case hosting your website on a server located in Australia will always help you.

How does this help:

• Search engines will know that your website is hosted in Australia and hence will rank it higher for people searching from Australia.
• The hop count for the major portion of your audience i.e the Australians will be less. This means the website will open super fast for people in Australia who are your target audience.

Now most hosting providers operate from various countries. This DOES NOT mean that their servers are also located in the same country. You need to ask them their servers geographical location before making a decision of buying hosting with them.

So once you are done with knowing your target audience and product. You need to select a domain extension or TLD for that particular country and host your website in that country itself. This will boost your website traffic and sales.