Two events this week that just made hosting business in Australia a bit tougher.
1. Weakening US Dollar
Australian dollar has just hit 93 cent USD today, and it is still on its way to parity (which I doubt will happen but I can be very wrong). Everything has already been more expensive in Australia than in US, and strong Aussie dollar + weak US dollar has just made the gap even wider.
Australian hosts have never been able to compete in price against with those mega-oversellers in US. However now even the conservatively priced non-overselling US hosts look cheap. Looks like Australian hosts have to work very hard to win the price conscious consumers looking for bargain basement web hosting.
2. Geographical Target in Google Webmaster Tools
Google used to use domain name + server location to determine the geographical target of a website. So if you are an Australian site, but cannot afford to have a .au domain, the only way to get included in the Google AU SERP is by hosting on an Australian server. It happens to be one of the top reason I am looking for Australian VPS hosting so I can get a good ranking for my Australian-targeted sites.
Well, not anymore. According to Vanessa Fox,
If the TLD isn’t location-specific (such as .com), then search engines may use the location of the site’s IP address. This generally works pretty well, but sites that are hosted in a location other than their primary country can run into problems. In addition, large companies may have subfolders or subdomains for each country-specific site, rather than separate domains, and it may be problematic for those companies to secure each country-specific domain.
Now there’s a way to help avoid this type of guesswork, at least with Google. If you want to let Google know the location of your site, simply log in to the Google Webmaster Tools component of Google Webmaster Central.
Access the Tools tab, then choose Set Geographic Target. From there, you can provide information about where the site is located, and Google will use this information as a signal in ranking.
Basically your gTLD site can be preferred on Google AU without being hosted on Australian hosting — just tell Google Webmaster Tools that your site is Australian! And I have just migrated all but one site from my Australian VPS to my US-based servers, as that site requires a bit of interactivity.
Obviously it is no where near the end of Australian hosting business. There are still many latency-sensitive applications that need to be hosted on this big island. There are always customers who prefer to be served by local blokes/girls. There are always those who wish to support or to be supported by local business.
