Physical Location of Server Matters - Frequently Asked How To's Answered

Physical location of a server matters in many ways. Larger the distance a server is located away from a user, larger will be the time taken for the data to reach the user. Suppose, a user asks for certain information from a location in India, say Uttar Pradesh. If the physical server is located in the same state then the data (stored in the server) will take least time to reach the user. If the server is located anywhere in the US then the fetched data has to travel thousands of miles to reach the user. Therefore, the loading time of the sought information will be much more in the latter case. This is the reason why it has become important for the businesses to know the location of the server before choosing one. In fact, loading time has also become an important parameter for SEO ranking. Though this concept was first brought by Google (the largest search engine of the world), it has been adopted by almost all leading search engines. Loading time must be less so that the information is loaded faster, thereby improving user experience. Though physical locations are important, it's also important to recognize some of the advanced aspects of hosting. One such important aspect is the Content Delivery Networks (or CDNs).

In the following section, some of the important How-To's are discussed and answered -

How to Know where a Website's Physical Server is Located?

When you choose a hosting company you don't really know where their servers are located. We hardly inquire about the physical location of the servers before choosing the hosting service provider. In this section, we'll let you know how to track exact location of a site's servers. The process that is discussed here will give you a step-wise knowledge about the ways of tracking physical server of a website.

To know physical server location of a website, please follow the steps mentioned below -

Procedure 1 -

Step 1 - The first thing you need to open your command window. Once it has been opened, use the following command -

Tracert (space) (name of website)

This command is given for finding the Dedicated IP address of the concerned website you have sought information for. When you give this IP address, you come to know about how the fetched data reaches you from the server it's stored. Once you get the IP address, you can also type the same in the browser to check whether the same website is opening or not.

Let's give an example to clear the confusion (if any) -

Suppose you want to know the location of physical server for your favorite eCommerce website. Let us assume that your favorite online shopping website is Flipkart. Therefore, you need to open the command window first and type the following command -

Tracert flipkart.com

When you type this command, the command window shows the IP Address.

Step 2 -

Once you know the IP address, you'll know the exact physical location of the server from where the data was fetched and shown to you. Do you want to know how? Here it is -

Once you get the server's IP address, you have to visit a IP Location Finder kind of site. There are innumerable sites available on Google for knowing geo location of a particular website.

Visit such a site and past IP of the server you got for Flipkart in the designated IP location tracker location. In a similar way, you can also know the physical location of any other site say, Facebook.

How to Use CDN to Improve SEO?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. To know how CDNs can help SEO, first of all you have to know -

-What Content Delivery Networks are?
-How do CDNs Work?

Both the above mentioned queries are answered in the following paragraph -

CDNs include wide network of PoPs (Points of Presence), located at different geographical locations across the world. All these servers store cached copies of the same content. When a person fetches any data or information, the Content Delivery Network reaches the nearest geographically located PoP and gets the information from there. In such an arrangement, fetching of data is not done from the original server that might be located at a location far from the user. The caching servers make the entire process of content delivery faster. Now to help you with the setting up of the CDNs, the following how-to section is helpful -

How to Set-up a CDN?

Step 1 - You've to access DNS settings of the domain

Step 2 - Analyze the website to check whether it's taking advantage of the CDN. A tool called WebPage Test can help you to analyze a test site. You can use a free CDN or a paid CDN solution.

Step 3 - Once the CDN is implemented, run the tool such as WebPage Test to check whether the CDN has been integrated properly or not. Once the name of the CDN shows up in the test, it means the CDN has been implemented correctly.

Step 4 - Once the CDN is implemented you'll see that the webpages are opening faster as the loading time has decreased. You can also check the ways, to increase the loading speed of the site before and after implementing the CDN. Once the loading time gets faster, your SEO ranking will get a major boost in a short period of time. This is because loading time is one of the main SEO parameters of Google.

This is the way through which SEO for your site can be improved with the use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

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