Where should the website for your holiday property be hosted?
That’s a question that very few people consider yet it’s one of the most significant choices that you can make in your marketing.
By default, a growing number of people are using sites hosted in America simply because that’s where the majority of the free sites live. Getting such a free site will cost you far, far more than even the most expensive paid hosting that you can get, unless your customers are primarily in America.
The reason for that is that one of the key factors that the search engines use to determine what order to serve up search results is the location of your hosting. So, for example, if your customers largely come from the UK and your hosting is in America you’ll find that you appear much further down the list than if your hosting were in the UK.
If you’re not sure where your hosting is (and many people aren’t), you can check it by going to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scrolling down to “IP location”.
How significant is this? Well, for a UK customer base hosting in the UK will at least double the traffic on your site compared to an identical site hosted in America and I’ve seen one case where the traffic went up 30 fold. Own-site bookings follow the traffic upwards in a similar proportion. When you consider that a good UK site will cost at most £10/month vs a good American site at £5/month that saving of £5/month will cost you dear in terms of lost bookings.
Ah, but it would be a major hassle to move, wouldn’t it? No, and it doesn’t take long either. For a simple site (and most holiday accommodation sites are fairly simple), you can do the entire move in under an hour and most of that is spent in waiting around for files to download or upload rather than actually doing anything.
Popularity: 28% [?]
Related posts:
- Who should you host your holiday property website with?
- Happy New Year from the best accommodation website in the world!
- What about choosing and registering your perfect website domain?
- Where do you start when you’re building your holiday property website?
- How NOT to design a website for your holiday property