Is the web hosting location important these days?

Question

I was recently looking at some web hosting solutions and some of the providers offered various hosting locations e.g. US or UK based servers.

My question is: does it really make a difference from the performance point of view? Lets say that I am expecting most of the traffic coming from continental Europe?

Would the fact that the servers are based in UK make bigger difference if the traffic was coming from the UK.

Any pros and cons of having a website hosted in the same county as the most of the expected traffic?

Answer 1

Yes, distance = latency = slower. That's why Google, Amazon, and the other big sites have multiple datacenters in different regions and even continents.