Why host in a foreign country?
You’ve had great success with your site in English, and have developed foreign language versions – how do you go about getting more traffic to these sites? Local inbound links with anchor text in the right language, using the correct country’s top-level domain and verifying the locale within Google webmaster tools. The content should also come from a server located in that country. This can either be accomplished using a content proxy, or by hosting the sites with a foreign ISP.
Content proxies for foreign language SEO
Proxies are servers that accept connections from users, fetch content on their behalf, then relay the content back to the original requester. These proxies can also cache the results, so they offer a speed improvement for users. The content appears to be hosted on the foreign server, when in fact it is just holding a copy of the content. This is especially beneficial for dynamic database-driven sites – if you were to really host the foreign language version of your site, you might need to maintain copies of your database on remote machines. Not only that, but a proxy can run on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) machine with no problem, taking up fewer resources and costing less. Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd or squid can be used.
Hosting foreign language sites for SEO
If your site is mostly (or entirely) static HTML, images and CSS hosting a copy with a foreign ISP might be a better route. In this case, you have no database and are simply serving static files. Site with few scripts and no databases are perfect for foreign VPS hosting, again using Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd. Caching can be turned on to improve performance – although the actual content is hosted as a file on the server, the web server software can be configured to maintain a copy in memory, improving speed.
Performance considerations with foreign hosting
The “regular” tricks of the trade should be employed, especially since most VPS systems are not as powerful as a standalone server, and the networks in some countries are not as robust as North America. Using in-memory caching, HTTP keepalives, HTTP expiry (Apache’s mod_expires for example), bundling external JavaScript/CSS files and minimizing image use and size are all well-known techniques that will improve performance. The main goal should be to minimize the number of requests made to the server, as well as limiting the size of the requests. Often times latency is a bigger killer than bandwidth.
Looking for foreign hosting?
I provide monitored VPS hosting solutions in the following countries:
- USA
- UK
- Australia
- France
- Italy
- Germany
- Spain
- China
Please contact me for a foreign hosting quote. Also note that I provide foreign server setup and maintenance for other services including web proxies and backup servers.