Common sense seems to have prevailed and could help the way businesses view their online budgeting.
It has often been the case that companies will look to outsource the hosting element of their online presence to take advantage of the cost reductions available via cheap regional or international hosting providers that have a "stack it high sell it cheap" business model. This often results in servers being installed in countries outside of your geographic marketplace where datacentre development is cheaper. Unfortunately, this also means that your site can be given an IP address outside your country of trade.
So what does this mean for your business?
Google have confirmed that search engine website rankings are directly affected by the localisation of your web site's IP Number. For example, the IP number for www.t2studios.net is 217.148.32.220 and this is localised for the UK – it will therefore get best listings on Google.co.uk as apposed to Google.com or any other of the global search pages.
For best ranking results, the IP number for a company that trades in the UK should always be registered within the UK. This sounds obvious but there a large number of UK companies with a .com domain name and hosting space outside the UK that receive considerable traffic and very few sales – mainly because they are getting traffic from countries that won’t buy their product.
Alternatively, if you are UK based but most of your trade is in Europe you should look to work with a hosting provider that can support multiple international IP addresses and make sure you get the right listings on the right search engines.
If you need any help just get in touch.