Reading Time: 10 minutes In a fast-paced, online market such as Southern Ontario, "Speed" has become more than a technology measurement; it's also become the "currency" of trust. As a Greater Toronto Area (GTA) business owner, you've undoubtedly experienced first have and your local consumers expect to receive their products or services in an efficient manner - whether it's coffee quickly in the morning, timely transit systems, or instant loading websites. When a prospective customer from Mississauga or Downtown Toronto clicks on your website link, it activates a series of processes involving data transfer. So the question many business owners would like answered is how far away does that data need to travel? At 4goodhosting, we've been focused on optimizing our infrastructure for the needs of the local market for years, and the data we've been able to gather supports our assertion that out of all the factors involved in website performance, the most critical is geographic proximity. This guide will provide an insight into how fast web hosting in Toronto is the GTA business community's secret weapon to compete successfully with competitors. Online latency, the technical aspects of it, and a quick comparison of "Local" vs "Canada" High-Performance Web Hosting Standards will also be discussed in detail in the following sections of this guide. The Physics of the Internet: Distance Equals Delay A common misconception is that because we have the internet and it can be accessed from anywhere, distance does not matter. In fact, however, the internet is made up of a large number of physical networks comprised of fibre-optic cables. Even when sending information at the speed of light, it will take time for the information to travel from one location to another. This time delay for data transmission is known as Latency. You may have heard about "The Hop" Problem. If your website is hosted on a huge data centre in Virginia or California (or in another country), every time a GTA-based user requests something from your website, that request has to travel across an international border and go through a number of different network exchange points, or "hops." Each of these hops is going to add a few milliseconds...
