Cloudways Hosting - Will server location make a big difference in US?

Question

If hosting several WordPress websites on 1 server, will it make a difference between choosing a server location to a particular area or will choosing a more central location like Chicago/Dallas be good enough? We don't mind spending a few more $ to create additional servers.

Using Cloudways w/ Vultr setup. We have several websites that have their audience/users that are local and some other websites that are more national.

Since Vultr has several locations spread across the United States (Silicon Valley, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and NY/NJ), I was wondering if it makes sense to create servers in each location. The plan is to put the website/application on the right server location whose site audience/users are closest to.

Will this be overkill? Will choosing a more central location work fine for all?

Places like NY/NJ and Chicago seem pretty close for the most part and just wasn't sure if it will make any difference in performance (speed/load times). Any insight will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Having your server close to your customer base is ideal. If your customers are in different geographic regions then it's best to find a central location for most customers and use a content delivery.network (CDN) to distribute website content. This will allow your website to operate faster and more efficiently across geographic regions. You can consider Cloudflare.com which is a common CDN provider.