Should the host for your website or blog be geographically located in Canada? A lot of people believe this is essential but it’s not. In fact, it may work against you.
This short article describes some factors to consider if you’re looking for information about having a .ca domain name, wondering about the effectiveness of a .ca name for reaching Canadian consumers, wishing to support Canadian companies, or have privacy concerns.
Hosting is not the same thing as having a .ca name
Hosting has nothing to do with having a .ca name. You can register for a .ca name but still host outside Canada.
Having a .ca domain name is a good idea if:
• you have a service or company of interest mainly to people in Canada
• you provide services or products where Canadian branding is important
• you are not very interested in providing services outside Canada
• you have a strong reason why you want people to know your company is in Canada
You must register for a .ca name with a company in Canada that has been licensed to sell .ca names by CIRA. The administrative contact for your website must have a Canadian street address and phone. But you do not need to host with the same company, and it may be preferable not to host in Canada.
Search engine optimization and .ca names
If you have reason to believe the majority of your market uses a Canadian search engine like Yahoo.ca (“reason to believe” being based on web statistics about your visitors over a long period of time), then having a .ca address may help your site come up on Canadian search engine results above sites outside Canada. But be aware this also depends on how well your search engine optimization has been done. Proper search engine optimization using key words like Canada, Canadian, British Columbia, BC, Vancouver (or any other Canadian city) can result in similar rankings without having a .ca name. The .ca name alone is usually not sufficient.
Factors to consider when choosing a host
A host is a company that owns servers (computers) where your website files are stored. The choice of a host should be made on factors like the quality of their servers and their position on the Internet.
If you’re looking for a stable dedicated IP, you may have to look to the States. If you are looking for a shared IP, remember that the hundreds or thousands of sites that share your IP number are much more important than any geographic location will ever be, barring earthquakes of course. You can easily do a search on Google for “find IP neighbours” then type in any website URL to see who else is sharing your server. You can also do a search for “adult content” + the host’s name to see if they accept other sites with adult content. If they do, be aware that the quality of your IP neighbours’ files and the nature of their files can affect your own Google results.
A server’s proximity or “hops” to the internet backbone are equally important. A low number of hops ensures fast and efficient connections between your visitor’s computer and your server’s location.
The majority of requests to servers in Canada are routed through the States and back again. You should think about the geographic location of your target market, and choose a host geographically located close to both your target market and the Internet backbone. For example, if your target market is in Vancouver BC and you host with Netfirms, an Ontario company, your target market would have to make 15 Internet hops to reach their server (and 15 more for the files to be sent back to them). Their request might be routed from Vancouver to Seattle, to Washington DC, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago and Toronto before reaching Markham, Ontario where the Netfirms server is located. But if you were to host with a server in Texas, their request would go straight down the West Coast pipeline in only 4 hops: from Vancouver to Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles then Houston. The potential for losing data in longer routes, not to mention bandwidth traffic jams spread across an extra 20 hops coming and going, are significant factors in choosing a server by geography.
Canadian hosts are not necessarily located in Canada
Many people host with companies because they advertise as Canadian companies, and people want to support businesses located in Canada. Canadian hosting companies, however, do not usually use servers in Canada. Most Canadian host companies use servers located outside Canada, usually in the UK or the States.
Popular hosts like GoDaddy.ca (Arizona), Justhost (Utah), Hostmonster (Utah) and Fat Cow (Massachusetts) spend vast amounts of money promoting themselves as Canadian web hosts when in fact their servers are geographically located in the United States, as your own files will be as well.
In addition, many Canadian hosting companies outsource their support services to other countries. So signing up for a Canadian host because they advertise “friendliness” and “superior Canadian service” really may not be to your advantage when you need support, because the representatives may actually be in foreign countries.
Cost
We regularly see companies charge insane amounts of money for plans they call “Gold”, “Platinum”, “Advanced” or other names assigned to a “level” of service. But the competitive nature of the industry means that large American and UK hosts can offer hosting for as little as $3.95/month for unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, free weekly backups, unlimited email accounts and more, with much better security as well. We frequently see Canadian companies charging more than $40/month for exactly the same thing, and there is no practical reason for it.
Concerns about the Patriot Act
Many people express concerns about the Patriot Act and its implications for the content on their websites. But if the pages of your website are public, the information is available to everyone anyways. If the information on your site is private, such as information stored in a database, only citizens of the US are subject to the Patriot Act. And neither citizens of the US nor hosts in the US are required by law to give up usernames and passwords. (Of course the United States government will likely find ways to retrieve any information it wants, but if they can do that to non-compliant sites in the States they can certainly do it to sites located anywhere else.)
Concerns about privacy
People who are concerned about hosting in Canada for reasons of “privacy” on the Internet often do not realize the amount of information that is already accessible about them on servers spread across the States.
Most people use online services that store enormous amounts of history about their activities. The information you post on your Facebook account, Linked in, Twitter or any of the hundreds of other social media accounts is stored on servers in the US, and is accessed and used by companies you’ll never know about. If you use Google docs, Flickr or Youtube, your content is on American servers. If you use Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail, copies of all of your emails are being stored on US servers. Credit card information for multinational corporations is routinely stored on US servers. Every time you register software or other online product, you are likely registering it on a US server. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics store your visitor information on US servers. If you belong to a professional organization, like the Kitsilano Chamber of Commerce, your membership information and event photos are likely stored on a US server (in this case, Texas).
Compared to this, the information on most websites is pretty innocent and, by nature, in the public domain already. Hosting in Canada is generally only necessary for large institutions that are sensitive about the nature of the information stored in databases. Smaller companies and individuals should be more concerned about the quality and qualifications of the host’s servers, getting good value for their money (shared hosting for $9.95/month or less, with no limitations on storage or bandwidth), and the host’s geographic proximity to Internet hubs.
The solution for Mac users is to switch to “plain text” email before attaching images. Find “plain text” under Preferences/Composing. You will not be able to use your graphic signature in plain text mode, but your pictures will be sent properly — as attachments — instead of being embedded in the email. Again, do not include any image signatures or your mail will be converted back to HTML and the images will embed themselves in the email.
I was a little thrown at first with the iPad’s one screen at a time behavior. Like a miserly wife counting bottles of beer, I was allowed to view this screen or that screen, but never the two screens at once. For someone who works all day with two 24 inch monitors side-by-side so I can have 10 windows and applications open at the same time, that was a blow. But I moved on. Who knew there were literally thousands of free apps I could download to see if a painting is level, or change my “Face” photo to an Andy Warhol? And the prospects of reading books on it was thrilling to say the least.
Meet Yuri, the mascot of Kits Media. He spends his day in the middle of it all. A robust but dainty little fellow, he’s not one to take “No” lightly. He’s a bit of a thief and we have to ask clients to stow their belongings securely on the table in case they find a pen or lipstick missing after the meeting.
Every so often I read about something on the Internet so weird and wacky that I just have to share it with everyone. 
