Is Geographical Location Important In Web Hosting?

[Brain Coffey]

I am comparing various web hosting companies. Some are based in USA, some in Europe while some are based in India. I am doing this for one of my friend's websites whose target audience is in Europe. I would like to know will the loading time increase if I select a hosting company based in USA? It is a general belief on the internet that you must have your hosting servers close to the location of your visitors.

It will be great if someone can provide me with some information on this....

[Shanaya]

The web pages might not load extremely slowly because of a certain geographical location. There is no particular point you should worry about. But yes, I will have to mention here that the website will load significantly faster if it is hosted in the same continent from where the visitors are browsing the website and the download speed will also be better.

[Kavita Menon]

I would like to mention the latency issue here. If your website consists of a continuous stream of data, then the latency might not be huge. However, if the website receives hits multiple times for completing a transaction, for example if the ajax app is called multiple times, then this might result in high latency.

[Arnav]

I think that the geographical location surely makes a difference. Take this example - If your website is based in India and if your server is in US, then it is obvious that when someone tries to access your website, it will be called from the US server and therefore, it will take time to load. If you have an option of setting up your hosting server in your own geographical location, then you must take it up.

[Brain Coffey]

Very well explained. Thanks for the information everyone! Cheers!