Originally posted on Hosting Facts
What increasingly energy efficient datacenter design can mean for you
When you hire a company to host your website, you’re basically paying that company to arrange for the code to your website to made available to computers around the world, 24/7/365. That company may store and run that code on its own computer or rent that computer space from another company. This computer is, of course, not at all like your computer or mine, but (in most cases) is one of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of hard drives accessed by huge banks of servers stored in a datacenter in a location that may or may not be known to you.
It’s not that the information is secret – most web hosting companies are very forthcoming about where their datacenters are and, in some cases, even how they work. But the average consumer tends not to be that concerned about where their website is physically hosted, so long as it is up and running all the time and is not so far away that it effects load times or Google’s location factor in its ranking algorithms. However, where your website is hosted in the real world can matter. Besides the potential benefit to ranking factors, the kind of datacenter your hosting service uses can have an effect on both the cost of hosting and the footprint your website leaves.
To read the full article, view it on the Hosting Facts website here.
