Hosting your website in Australia offers many advantages.
1. Hosting Support and Service
You can’t beat support from your local country men and women. They speak your language. They live in your timezone. They understand your business needs, and it’s cheaper to call them on the phone. You also won’t need to pay the extra bank fees for exchange rates when paying invoices and you can claim taxes such as GST.
2. Speed / Latency
Your website will load quicker for your customers if hosted in the same country as them. If you host in another country then your website has to travel much further to get to your customers location.
3. Bound by local laws
You will have peace of mind. Knowing that you and your hosting company are bound by the local laws of your country. You have an avenue of recourse if something bad does happen. Being hosted internationally you would have very little power to attend to a legal issue that may arise. This includes any issues arising with your email service associated with your domain name. This can be an important reason for hosting your website in Australia.
4. Search Engine Optimization / Google Ranking
Google and other search engines can easily identify in which country your website is hosted. Google uses this information to improve it’s search results by making the results more relevant to their searching audience. For this reason alone it is easily understandable why you would want to host your website in Australia, if most of your customers are located here. Hosting your website in Australia has some obvious benefits.
So why wouldn’t you be hosting your website in Australia?
Well you may think for the lower cost, but every country now offers cheap web hosting plans which are internationally competitive. The only real reason for hosting in another country is because it’s where your market is located. So the one rule to follow is “Where is your market located?”. The answer to this will most often be in your home country. Are you selling products locally and internationally and you have a reasonably large market internationally? You could consider hosting a copy of your website in the country/s in which you sell but it’s not essential. Alternatively you could use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
In conclusion, there are many advantages to hosting your website in Australia.