Whenever I travel I make it a habit to check my websites from the remote location I am at that time. No matter if it is a hotel room or at a friends place or family I am visiting. I pick my most important sites and check load times, overall performance and if it is an Adsense website of mine, I check the relevance of the ads, too. These things become especially true when I am in another country other than the United States. I have websites hosted in Dallas, Tx. With ThePlanet.com and I have websites hosted in Los Angeles, Ca. with HTTPME.com. Both providers offer really good connectivity for the entire US and Canada already. Traveling abroad in Europe as an example is also a good test. I have been to Germany not too long ago as an example and while load times are naturally slower than in the US, speed for my websites seems to be decent. So, I think I am lucky with the choice of web hosting that I made.
Of course this does matter more if you cater an international crowd for your websites. If you are targeting North Americal only this is less important. I actually make some money every month from international traffic. There is often less competition and if you look around you find enough products to promote. There is actually a ton of options available if you have UK traffic. In general Commission Junction has tons of international advertisers to choose from. Make sure to add your international websites to your profile before applying.
When choosing a web host that can serve the US and International visitors, it is important to find out how they connect to the Internet. You’ll find tons of place to run a trace against an IP on their network to see how many hops a visitor has to go through before reaching a website at that web host. The smaller the number of hops and lower the time between each hop, the better the connection for your visitors. My preferred provider to check trace times can be found here: http://www.tracert.com
If your web host has slow uplinks you might lose international visitors. It might be time to find a better web host. Ask a new web host for an IP address on a server your sites would be on and then check the trace information before signing up.
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