Is the server location really important?

[sren]

My fiends, I'll really apreciate some feedback on this one:

I'll publish a web site in spanish language, targeted to the spanish and latin american people (where I'm living), but not to an specific country.
I've been reading somewhere that it would be good to chose a Latin American hosting, because it would be better for SEO to have a latin american IP.

The problem is that I really like some hosting companys allocated in the USA, as they have somewhat better deals and are more reliable.

So, what would you recommend me to do?
It would be a drawback if I allocate my spanish sites in USA hosts?

Thanks for any comment.

[gpilling]

It is far more important to have a reliable server host than to worry about location. I went through hell two months ago moving all my websites to a new server after my old one just stopped responding.

Quality matters.

[ultimasurf]

Server location is only important if your target audience is mainly locals as your pages will be downloaded slightly faster. Whilst I don't want to be biased towards any non-US web hosting companies, I tend to agree with your observation that many US web hosting companies offer better deals.

[steve]

Server location is becoming much more important. The major search engines are using it when deciding what pages to display for country specific SERPs.

For example a .com hosted in the USA will show up in the Google.com SERPs but NOT in Google.co.uk with UK results only selected.

There has been some speculation that MSN expects the server and domain name to be in the target country, IE UK IP for server and .co.uk to show up.

IMHO the future for all search engines is tailoring the SERPs returned based on where the website is (determined by domain or IP) and where you search from.

[sren]

Steve, that sounds quite scary to me.
Let's say you're from (USA?), and you have a website focused to all english speaking people of the world.
But then your website is gonna get found only by people in the USA...
In spanish I will have the same problem. There're dozens of spanish speaking countries. And even if I host my site in one of them I would be cutting off my potential readers.
What about globalization? Isn't it what internet is all about?) (www).

I sincerely wish you're wrong on this one. :)

[trillianjedi]

I sincerely wish you're wrong on this one.

He's partially correct.

The best all round results I've found for new sites is to have (UK example) a .co.uk hosted on a US IP.

However, authority sites are authority sites wherever you are hosted. Do a lookup on the top 10 results for any competitive keyword. You'll see geographic specific tld's and IP's up there when they are truly authority sites, irrespective of geographic requests.

TJ