Offshore web hosting is simply hosting your website, data or application to a far off data center location from your place of origin. The same considerations should be given when choosing a offshore hosting provider as you would for a local hosting provider. So for example my marketplace is in the USA but I host my website in some other country like Russia.
The main reasons for taking hosting offshore, is mostly to enable forbidden activities that are illegitimate, forbidden or banned in their own countries. But this may not be the case for all offshore hosted websites.
Reasons to go for offshore hosting would be hosting copyrighted content for example torrents sites like private bay, adult content, getting around local laws and motivated by taxation policies.
Advantages of Offshore Hosting
Financial benefits – Developing countries have a lower cost of living compared to countries in the EU and US which have a higher cost of living with higher company taxes. So for companies trying to reduce there costs to increase there profits, offshore hosting can make great business sense.
Getting around Local Laws – If your website is hosting copyrighted content for example torrent a site like private bay. That is not allowed in EU or US, you could host your site in another country like Russia or Thailand. This could help you avoid the authorities, who may try to shut you down.
Disadvantages of Offshore Hosting
Overall Performance – This is straight forward disadvantage to offshore hosting. If your website is local, it is going to run faster and perform better. A site hosted on overseas servers will take time to render your website as the local location is not local. This affects the speed and performance and cause user experience issues.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this post on explaining what is a Domain Name and DNS was helpful. Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions below and thanks for reading!