Why should Canadians choose a Canadian Web Hosting Provider?
One question we get asked very often by potential clients is why they should choose a Canadian web hosting company, vs a potentially larger one in the US (or anywhere else in the world)?
Why should you choose a Canadian web hosting provider as a Canadian business? Well for starters there are the obvious reasons that apply to virtually any industry - you are a proud Canadian and prefer to invest money in your own economy - directly benefiting the local economy and thereby indirectly benefiting your own company. Another reason would be lower latency and therefore faster loading websites for your website visitors. These reasons have always been there, however now that the web hosting industry has grown tremendously in Canada over the last several years, there are other more compelling reasons - and ones that clients don't always consider initially.
SEO Benefits:
From a business perspective, choosing a Canadian web hosting provider for a Canadian company can potentially have huge benefits. While choosing a specifically Canadian company won't affect (positively or negatively) your global Google rankings, it can and will affect your local Google rankings. Google tends to make an assumption that if your IP address comes from Canada, and your top-level domain is .ca, then you’re probably based in Canada. It will assume that your business is therefore more relevant to someone searching from Canada and (especially) using google.ca than it is to someone searching from the US using plain old google.com (source: SEOChat). Studies have shown that 43% of Google queries are done using Google's local engine (source: Search Engine Land), and up to 50% for mobile searches (source: Screenwerk) - so ranking higher for google.ca can have a massive impact on your traffic, and ultimately on your business. Essentially what all this means is that the people searching for your Canadian company will have a much greater chance of finding it if you are hosted with a provider in Canada.
DMCA Concerns:
One of the largest reasons that Canadians have always chosen Canadian hosting providers (and in fact why many American and other worldwide clients also choose Canadian hosting providers) is the DMCA. There are countless stories of FBI agents raiding datacenters and seizing servers which contain allegedly illegal content. While we of course have no issue with illegal sites being shut down, the issue is that machines used as web hosting servers often have multiple sites hosted on them, the vast majority of which may have nothing to do with the alleged illegal content - meaning that if a server is seized by an overly broad DMCA claim, your completely legitimate site could be taken along with it. Compounding this is the fact that American web hosting providers have at times complied with completely illegitimate DMCA takedown requests.
Choosing a Canadian web hosting provider can mitigate this risk as Canadian web hosting providers are not required to immediately comply with DMCA takedown requests - meaning we have a chance to review the claim and if necessary isolate the site in question from our other clients. Even when the issue makes it to the courts, Canadian courts have a long history of denying overly broad search and seizure request brought about by the DMCA. For example, in 2012, an Ontario court outright rejected a DMCA search request stating that "that there is an enormous volume of information on the servers and that sending mirror image copies of all of this data would be overly broad, particularly in light of the scantiness of the evidence connecting these servers to the crimes alleged by the American prosecutors" (source: Michael Geist).
Pricing
Pricing of course is always a consideration from a web hosting client's perspective. In the past, Canadian based clients may have chosen US-based providers because they were a bit cheaper and cost was their primary concern. With the recent expansion of industry heavyweights like PEER1 and OVH here in Canada, the amount of datacentre space has increased massively, bringing down prices along with it - prices that Canadian web hosting companies can pass on to their clients. In addition to this, when choosing a Canadian based hosting provider you are generally also billed in Canadian dollars - saving you several percentage points that are often charged by credit card companies for currency conversion that would be charged for non-Canadian providers. Also, with the introduction of HST across a large portion of Canada, Canadian companies who choose a Canadian web hosting provider no longer have to pay any tax on that service, as any HST paid can be claimed as an input-tax-credit come tax time.
Powered by Green Energy
There's also the "green" factor. Canada is the world's third largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world (after China and Brazil), and one of few countries to generate the majority of its electricity from hydroelectricity (59% in 2006) (source: Wikipedia). What this means is there are a plethora of options for Canadian hosting providers to provide greener services. In fact two of Canada's largest datacentre's have gone above and beyond in terms of green factor: