A lot of web masters and online entrepreneurs that have clients worldwide or are just preparing to expand are asking the question: How should I proceed with the hosting and the websites for those countries?

This is a pretty important question, too, and it needs to be answered before jumping into the new found market. The most common solutions for this dilemma are creating subdomains or directories on your main domain for different countries or getting completely new domains with the country’s local Top Level Domain name. Most major corporations simply create directories on their main domain where they hold translations and customized sites for all the countries they operate in. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best way.

There are quite a lot of issues to consider before expanding a business to a foreign country. You have to know their culture, their traditions, superstitions and beliefs. If you don’t do a proper research (which is really easy to do online), you can end up in a situation where your products don’t sell at all or they’re even hated (rarely, but it happens).

But let’s say you are trying to expand into another western country, like France, Germany or Belgium (all are great markets for any products and a lot of affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs are taking advantage of that) and you did a bit of research, which is enough to get you started.

In that case, how can registering domains with a local TLD and getting a server from a local hosting company help you? Well, for starters, people will trust your domain name and brand more. If you have an online ordering system (if you do drop shipping, or sell info products), they will not think twice before ordering, because it’s a domain in their country and they’ll probably think you’re shipping from somewhere close, even if you are overseas.

Getting a server that is in a local data center and hosting the new site there will make it load faster, will make Search Engines rank it higher in that country due to the local IP (and there’s not as much competition as in North America) and you’ll pay much less! Yes, the cost of hosting in Germany and France is about 2-3 times cheaper than in the United States, and you get unlimited bandwidth, too, thanks to their national broadband programs.

A lot of successful entrepreneurs used these tactics to gain an advantage over major international companies, and it works really well. If you want to be successful in your online startup and its international expansion, you have to think ahead and differently than your competitors, and because you’ll be doing most of the business online, a good hosting and domain selection strategy can go a very long way.