Canada Business Consulting can help you “Canadianize” your website.
Canada is a world leader in telecommunications and internet services with a state-of-the-art communication infrastructure that is equivalent to anything available in the USA and Europe. Canada’s copyright, censorship and content laws are more lenient than those in the United States. This means your website and its content is safer from legal action. Canada anti-piracy laws are also very strict so your data is still safe from theft or mis-use by other parties.
If your target audience is Canadian (or North American), then a Canadian based service provider will decrease your website’s load time, improve client satisfaction and ultimately increase your sales.
Having a website hosted in Canada will increase your search relevancy
Better Privacy
Your websites, databases and emails are governed by the laws of where the server is located, i.e. Servers in Canada fall under the Canadian legal system and servers in the US fall under the US legal system. Even if you are a Canadian citizen, if your website is hosted in the United States, then you are subject to their laws and regulations.
Canada has much more robust legislation compared to the United States when it comes to online privacy rights. For instance, due to the Patriot Act, the United States government can legally access any data, block you from your data, and monitor your communications if your activity is deemed suspicious.
Under the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) private information on hosted servers is strictly regulated, with laws designed to protect sensitive and personal data. WHC fully complies with PIPEDA and more recently with Europe’s regulations too, referred to as GDPR.
Jacques Latour, Chief Technology Officer at CIRA, agrees. “Once your data travels outside of Canada’s borders it is open to the laws of the land. In the U.S., for example, Canadians have no right to privacy. We know that a portion of Canadian data travels south based on the nature of our internet’s infrastructure and how we navigate the web.”
To ensure your data is protected by Canadian law against intrusive provisions from the USA Freedom act, sweeping server seizures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the loss of net neutrality, and other foreign laws or policies, your website must be hosted on Canadian soil. If not, you at least have to inform your customers and visitors that their information may be processed in a foreign country. Under some circumstances, you may be prohibited entirely from moving personal data outside of Canada or your province, with or without consent.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is about more than keywords and content optimization. It’s about who you host with as well. If you’re looking to increase your presence in a certain country like Canada, then hosting your website in Canada is a good option. By choosing a hosting provider where your information is stored in Canada, you will automatically get a Canadian IP address.
As an example, when someone in Canada goes on google to search for hosting, it will automatically load Canadian IP addresses that are near to where you’re searching from, affecting your local Google rankings if your data is stored close-by.
Having a website hosted in Canada will increase your search relevancy within Canadian-based search results and increase Canadian traffic. You will have a much greater chance of being found on google if you are hosted with a provider in Canada.
For example, searches based in Italy will return different results than searches performed in Germany. Having a website hosted in Canada will increase your search relevancy within Canada-based search results and increase Canadian traffic. Many large corporations also have multiple variations of their site with different domain extensions (.COM, .CA, .CO.UK, etc.) based on location, and host those extensions in the extension’s corresponding country.