There is a claim that appears on almost every page written about hosting for Toronto businesses, and it goes roughly like this: host your site locally, your site gets faster, Google notices, you rank better. Two-thirds of that is true. The middle third — Google notices — is not, at least not in the way it is usually meant. And the first third is true for reasons that have very little to do with the one thing everybody cites, which is physical distance. This matters more than a pedantic correction usually would, because the wrong explanation leads to the wrong decisions. Businesses move hosting and see no improvement, because the thing they moved was not the constraint. Others stay on offshore hosting because "we have a CDN, so location does not matter," which is true for some of their traffic and badly wrong for the rest. And a great many Toronto businesses are paying a latency penalty on every single page view that they have never measured, because they test their site from a tool with a US test node and it looks fine. So this article does something different from the usual version. It explains what actually happens between a visitor in the Annex and a server, where the milliseconds genuinely go, why two servers both physically in Toronto can perform differently, what Google does and does not do with server location, and how to test whether any of it applies to your site rather than taking anybody's word for it. The short version, if you only want the short version: local hosting is worth having, the benefit is real, it is smaller than the sales pages claim on some pages and larger than the sceptics claim on others, and the mechanism is routing rather than distance. What "local hosting" is actually buying Strip away the marketing and a Toronto business hosting locally is buying three separate things that get bundled into one word. A shorter round trip. Fewer kilometres between the visitor and the server, which sets a hard floor on how fast any request can complete. A better route. Whether the packets actually take the short path,...
