Which is better – website hosting in Israel or abroad?
We know that choosing website hosting isn't easy. The selection is huge, everyone makes all kinds of promises, the prices are similar, and you don't know the difference between a RAID disk and a VPS, and probably don't want to know.
Nevertheless, one of the first questions asked when choosing hosting is: Is website hosting in Israel preferable to hosting abroad?
Here are some of the considerations you need to take into account:
Technical support and customer service
This section is first, and for good reason. Technical support in Hebrew can be critical when it comes to dealing with website malfunctions, and for many people, this is the most important criterion. If you manage the website yourself, don't have a good command of English, or don't have technical skills, it's very likely that you're better off choosing Israeli website hosting. It is true that service in Israel is not generally praised, but there are enough web hosting services that will provide you with quality service and, at the very least, speak to you in a language you understand.
Geographic location of the target audience
It's really very simple – if your website is only in Hebrew and your audience is only from Israel, there's no point in looking for web hosting in the US. The physical distance between the server and your target audience will slow down your website. Israeli websites hosted on high-quality Israeli servers will be faster than websites hosted abroad. Sometimes this means you will have to pay a little more, but it is worth the investment.
Website hosting budget
It is sometimes forgotten that the storage fee is a payment for the entire life of the website, so it is an ongoing expense that must be taken into account when calculating the budget for setting up and maintaining the website. The common perception is that Israeli hosting is more expensive, and for certain types of hosting, this is true. The Israeli market is relatively small, and hosting service operators cannot work at the prices of overseas hosting, which has hundreds of thousands of users. However, it is worth being wary of particularly cheap prices in general, even in Israel. If you need temporary, inexpensive, low-performance hosting, you may be able to get by with overseas hosting, which costs only a few dollars. On the other hand, the prices of high-quality Israeli hosting are no longer far from overseas prices, and are sometimes even cheaper. Just do some market research and figure out how much you pay per year for storage.