Hosting abroad: why it is worth choosing

One of the criteria when choosing hosting is location. Many entrepreneurs and webmasters hesitate over whether to take hosting abroad. For lack of information they make ill-considered decisions that show up later in how their sites run — or they miss out on the advantages that hosting in Europe brings.

Let us work out how well founded the main worries are, and what speaks in favour of hosting in European data centres specifically.

What to weigh up when choosing

When choosing between domestic and foreign hosting, keep in mind that location affects how a business runs. Which factors matter?

1. Being outside the domestic jurisdiction. Sadly, the business climate in the CIS countries is not the best, and disputes between IT companies and supervisory authorities are common. They often end with equipment being seized and a site going offline. With the site hosted abroad, that is far less likely.
2. A business aimed at foreign markets. The experience of your visitors depends on the site's speed, and that will be higher with servers in Europe. The data centre's location affects how a site performs in different places even if you use a CDN — Cloudflare or a similar one.
3. The need for the site to run reliably. European hosting providers generally have newer, more powerful hardware. The main thing affecting hosting performance is the type of disk storage. We covered how drive types relate to hosting speed in a separate article.

On all of these counts, hosting and servers in Poland are an excellent solution if you are launching a business aimed at Europe or the CIS countries.

The usual fears about foreign hosting

Most of the objections that keep people away from foreign hosting providers rest on nothing but a lack of information. Such fears deserve to be called myths.

What if a big time difference affects how the hosting and the site work?

In reality the time difference with European countries is one or two hours. That is not critical for most business processes.

Technical support in English only will make dealing with them harder.

It is true that among European hosting providers not many offer technical support in Russian. But we know how important it is for you to take in complex technical information easily, so our team includes Russian-speaking administrators. Choose Host4Biz and you get reliable foreign hosting with Russian-speaking technical support.

Will there be difficulties with legal and financial matters?

There will not. Legal and financial matters at foreign hosts are worked out to the point of automatism, precisely because clients from all over the world use their services. A universal public offer agreement covers every type of client and needs no physical signature, while invoices, which matter to companies, are sent as PDFs.

Hosting abroad. Europe or the USA?

Some of the worries about foreign hosting are fair. But those difficulties mostly concern hosting in the USA. That option really can cause trouble, because of the time difference and the absence of Russian-speaking technical support.

1. The main advantage of hosting in Europe is more powerful, more modern hardware. Thanks to it, European hosting will take a project of any size and the heaviest of loads.
2. European hosts are also better protected against DDoS attacks. Data centres often offer DDoS protection themselves, tracking and deflecting attacks.
3. Favourable pricing. You can compare our Host4Biz plans with competitors' prices and see for yourself. Our hosting costs less than many, with excellent support and high uptime. On top of that we offer a set of free extras: an SSL certificate, backup hosting, a test domain, site and mail migration and so on.

Where to host a project is of course for each company to decide. All we have tried to do here is dispel a few myths and show what hosting in Europe offers. European hosting is a very convenient way to grow a business aimed at Europe and the CIS countries, and we will gladly help you with that.