Web hosting companies based in Australia generally charge a higher monthly fee than companies who offer comparable services based in the United States, it’s sad but true. When you consider that the amount of cash that it takes to cover expenses is, and should be, the first concern of any business it makes you stop and think, and you should: If you are an Australian website owner and you can save money by using an American VPS you have to ask yourself

why you should I keep my business with an Australian based VPS host?

There are several aspects of this issue that should be considered before making your decision, namely: connection speed, savings in hosting fees, and the speed at which support is available.

Several years ago extensive research was conducted to determine how long the average person will wait for a page to load before getting bored and navigating away from that page. The survey determined that only 8 seconds stood between a person leaving a site and a potential customer. Newer research indicates that that response time has significantly decreased to between 4 and 6 seconds, depending on which survey´s numbers that you use. In either case if you are using a slower connection you may be losing a great deal of business. Researchers and network engineers also know that a slow website can cause other kinds of problems, like shopping cart bailouts and low conversion rates. An Australian website using an American based VPS may save some money on hosting fees but will have to suffer slower load times and an increased amount of downtime, these alone are significant enough to lose business due to impatient surfers, and losing income is the only thing worse than paying more for your expenses.

The second important issue to consider is money. The bottom line for most businesses, especially those with smaller budgets, is that American VPS companies are far less expensive than their Australian counterparts. The average cost of using an Australian VPS is AUD $18 per month or AUD $216 a year. An American VPS on the other hand can be found for as low as AUD$6.30 a month or AUD$75 a year. That amounts to a saving of nearly 70 % savings. If you are working on a tight budget this can be a big enough savings to justify slow response and increased downtime.

Finally, and this is especially important if you have a high traffic website, is support. The very worst thing that can happen is to have technical problems either just before or during your peak hours and the convenience of having the option of calling on-site support to help you deal with these issues as quickly as possible. If you are using anything except a local VPS provider this is not an option. A local VPS company can help you have much more dependable service by not only offering an online support staff to help you with the simpler problems but also have the ability to send technicians directly to your business to assist with more complex issues. The speed at which you are able to correct technical problems will determine the amount of downtime your website undergoes. Using a local company can not only increase the speed and response time of your server, but also of the servers support staff.

So when it comes down to it the upside of American based hosting is purely a cost reduction which may be eradicated by currency fluctuations, whereas going with a host that is local to your client base brings two upsides in that you get increased response time for your webpage and your support.

It’s a no brainer really.

Check out our the rest of our series on Choosing a VPS Host and check back for more updates soon!

Cheers,
The Australian VPS Hosting Team