In what country should I host my web app? [closed]

Question

// I'm not sure if this is the right QA site, but I will just have a try

I'm currently developing a web app that aims at an international audience and that will have an english interface. I'm living in germany and thinking about where to host the app.

I've noticed that many other european web apps have their servers in the USA (according to flagfox). What are the advantages of hosting in the USA?

The advantages of hosting in my home country:

• Easier to get support (timezone and language)
• It's cheaper (I have no idea why, but it is)

Answer 1

This is a very loaded question. Ideally, you would host your applications on servers nearest your consumers. (by nearest, I mean... lowest latency, fewest hops, etc... not necessarily geographically) Oddly enough, I've seen situations where servers across the ocean are "better" (bandwidth/latency/fewest hops) than local (geographically) servers... and worse. Depending on the scale of the web-app... you may want to consider multi-homing the site. (servers in multiple data-centers throughout the world)

99.9% of this discussion depends on YOUR needs. Obviously, for a web-app to be successful, you want it to appear fast... and a high amount of latency will kill you. Your job is to figure out what is acceptable... and what isn't. A company would fail if they threw all their profit away, so cost is also a strong consideration. Maintainability is also very important. If the data center is cheap & fast... who cares if you can't get access to it if it goes down... or if you need to work 500 times harder to do a simple task like uploading some files.