Website hosting and data centres: what actually matters.

Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition against a planned 150MW data centre near Norwich, on land opposite Tesco on Ipswich Road. The debate is about energy use, countryside and local impact. But it also raises a quieter question that most business owners never think about: where does your website actually live, and does it matter?

Short answer: yes, but not always in the ways you'd expect. Where your site is hosted affects its speed, how often it goes down, its carbon footprint and sometimes your costs. Here's what we think is worth knowing.

What a data centre does for your website

A data centre is a building full of servers, cooling systems and backup power. Your website files, databases and often your email sit on one of those servers. When someone visits your site, their browser asks that server for your pages, images and code, and the server sends them back.

Your website doesn't live on your laptop. It lives in a building with backup power and several internet connections, built to stay online all day, every day. For most small businesses, that space is rented from a hosting provider. That might be a big name like AWS or Google Cloud, a smaller regional company, or a platform that sits on top of them. You never see the building, but your site depends on it.

Does location affect speed?

Yes, but it's one factor among many. A server in London will usually get your homepage to a Norwich customer a little faster than one in Frankfurt or Virginia. The gap is small for a single file, but it adds up a bit across every font, image and script on the page.

Most modern hosting also uses a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN keeps copies of your site in lots of locations, so a visitor in Norwich gets files from a nearby node, often in London or Amsterdam, not from the original server. That makes the physical server location matter less, though it doesn't make it irrelevant.

What matters far more than location:

• How the site is built. A heavy theme with dozens of plugins will be slow wherever it's hosted.
• Images. Uncompressed photos are one of the most common causes of slow pages.
• Hosting quality. Cheap shared hosting often means your site shares a server with hundreds of others. If one of them gets a traffic spike or gets hacked, yours can slow down or go offline too.

A well-built site on a server 200 miles away will still beat a badly built one hosted next door.

Uptime and resilience

Data centres are built for backup: spare power, several network links, fire suppression. But not all hosting on top of them is equal. If your business relies on online bookings, enquiries or sales, an hour offline is lost money.

Managed hosting costs more than the cheapest shared plans, but you get steadier performance and someone on call when things break. In our view, a sensible small business setup has:

1. Reliability. An uptime guarantee of 99.9% or better, with a clear agreement on what happens if it's missed.
2. Speed. Fast enough that visitors don't give up and Google doesn't hold it against you.
3. Security. Automatic SSL certificates and protection against common attacks.
4. Backups. Taken automatically and stored somewhere separate from the live site.
5. A staging copy. So changes can be tested before they go live.
6. Support. When something breaks at 9pm on a Saturday, someone should answer.

For sites built on modern tools like Next.js, platforms such as Vercel or Netlify handle hosting, the CDN and SSL for you. You don't have to think about servers at all, which is how it should be for most small businesses.

The environmental side

The Norwich debate has put data centre energy use in the spotlight, and it's a fair concern. Data centres use roughly 1% of the world's electricity, and that share is growing. Not all of it comes from renewable sources.

Your website is a small part of your footprint, but it's a part you control. Some hosting providers, including some UK ones, run on renewable energy or offset their emissions. Others don't share their energy mix at all, and won't tell you unless you ask. A provider that's serious about this will publish its numbers, ideally checked by a third party, including its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). PUE compares the total power a data centre uses with the power its servers use. Below 1.5 is reasonable, and below 1.2 is very good.

This matters more for some businesses than others. Surplush, a Norwich wholesale platform we built, tracks carbon savings for each account and delivers by e-cargo bike in Norwich, Cambridge and London. For them, renewable hosting is just consistency with the rest of the brand. If your customers care about this kind of thing, it's worth checking.

Questions to ask your developer or host

You don't need to become a hosting expert. But you should be able to get clear answers to these:

1. Where is the main server, and does the site use a CDN?
2. Who manages the hosting, and what happens if the site goes down out of hours?
3. How often are backups taken, and how quickly can one be restored?
4. Can the hosting cope if traffic suddenly doubles?
5. Does the host use renewable energy, and does it publish a carbon policy and its PUE?
6. What's included in the monthly cost, and what costs extra?
7. Can I move my site to another provider if I need to?

Should you host locally?

Not necessarily. For a business serving customers in Norfolk, a UK server or a CDN with a strong UK presence usually makes sense. But it isn't a hard rule. Choosing hosting isn't about finding the nearest data centre. It's about a provider that keeps your site fast, online and secure, and that fits your values.

It also comes back to how the site is built. A site that doesn't load extra code or oversized images is faster for your visitors and uses less energy on the server. That's the part that makes the biggest difference, and it's the part we spend most of our time on.

The petition near Norwich is a useful reminder that the internet runs on real buildings, cables and power. If you don't know where your website lives or who looks after it, now is a good time to find out.