Does the geographic location of my server matter?

I'm planning a new Dolphin site, my members will primarily be UK based (as am I). The Dolphin approved / optimised hosts I can find are all US based and from the questions I've asked so far, unless I go with a dedicated server then my shared or VPS server will be based in the US. Would this make a noticeable difference to site speed etc?

Hello,

this will make a difference for the speed on your site, and for the result in google search results.

If your users are in UK, it is better to have your server in UK.

If you dont care about SEO (what will be strange), you can also use CDN like cloudflare to speed your site for UK users.

No this will make no difference google still do like to find a uk site on a uk machine but is not as relevant as it was last year  as you can set the geo preference of user base  in your google webmaster tools. you just have to make sure your server time is correct with uk time this is achieved by placing this code date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');  just after the <?php tag at the top of the file inc/header.inc.php

Good luck

I don't think it matters where the server is located to be honest!   If you have a good server, good connection, and it is optimized correctly then it will perform at it's best whatever the location ...

Funny thing about a lot of hosting companies is that even though they may be UK located or USA etc ... Most times their servers will be located in different locations for example UK companies may have servers in Germany and other non-UK locations ...

Over the past number of years I have had servers in many different locations and it's never made a difference to Speed, rankings or anything else for my network ....

Technically, you want the least amount of hops for your members; so that mean if you are mainly Europe, you would want a server in Europe, and mainly US, you would want a server in the US.  However, as far as speed to your members, that is really dependent on their connection to the site and not so much on your server location.  With the internet backbone running on fibre; it is not the same as the old days when the internet was first getting started.  As for SEO, if by SEO you mean search engine ranking, then your server location will not have anything to do with that.