Why should it matter ?
If your site is hosted in US have you noticed the long delay before your webpages start appearing on the browser. While some of the other big media sites are 'snappy' as in they start instantly loading up. This is because of the 'latency' due to physical distance from the data center where the site is hosted.There is a lot of performance optimization that you can do with CSS sprites ( reduces the number of image elements to load) , combining CSS files, javascript minify, concat and at the bottom apart from other Y! Slow rules.Dedicated RAM, sufficient IOPS and fair share of CPU are some other elements that need to be in place so a web visitor to your site is not queued for several seconds before she gets her first byte of your website.
Add to it hosting in India at < 85ms latency, it gets you another level of performance boost beyond these optimizations where you can aim for snappiness that only big boys in the media industry could hope to buy till now in India. Think a 200 ms per page element saving on load times. Google's research shows it is important to reduce latency of your webpages http://code.google.com/speed/files/delayexp.pdf
A lot of Internet players in India now recognize the importance of having their websites available at a lower latency for faster response times for the end users. The latency to US/German datacenters is around 300/270 ms which translates into several additional seconds while loading up pages of websites. The big players have always chosen to host locally in India despite the high costs long associated with hosting in India.
How do I find out if my data center/web hosting company hosts me in India Assuming you are in India and if you are on windows use the run dialog to open up the command prompt by typing in 'cmd'pingis your friend.
As an example :-C:Documents and SettingsTarun Dua>ping e2enetworks.com
Pinging e2enetworks.com [180.151.0.212] with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=54Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54Ping statistics for 180.151.0.212:Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:Minimum = 81ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 51msLess than 100ms (milliseconds) ping round trip time is a good indicator if your webhost is located in India.
More than 280 milliseconds is fairly a UK or US based host who remotely manages servers from India. So I would really like to move to an Indian web host ? Check out our hosting plans hereTry E2E Cloud to believe in it. Sign-up for a free trial here