UK Web Hosting
Country specific hosting is vital to search engine rankings; this is because they have a bias towards websites being hosted in the country that the domain originates from. This means that for .uk domains having a UK web host could provide more profitable and targeted traffic. This is the reason that many uk businesses.
Of course this traffic is most important for businesses that will benefit a lot more from a visitor in the UK than one from somewhere else as they are more likely to purchase a product, but individuals can also benefit from this too. If someone who needed a WordPress hosting account was writing a blog then having higher search engine rankings would find more visitors who could relate to the blog and thus would be more likely to revisit it in future.
Many people believe that this bias is provided by the search engines as it should lead to more relevant results, with sites on uk based hosting providing more accurate search results for people in the UK. Of course another effect of this is being with a quality uk hosting company your sites will load faster than if they were hosted in Europe, USA or anywhere else, this is down to the actual time the data takes to travel between these countries.
Hosting in the UK may be slightly more expensive than the USA due to lower costs there, however this small increase in cost may in fact make a great many times more value for your company by attracting better web traffic which can lead to more sales and more profit! Some of this cost can also be offset for uk businesses as they will be able to reclaim the VAT charged on this.
It is possible to see the difference that hosting can make yourself, if you go to google.com and search for a term such as shopping, then compare this to a search in google.co.uk you will see the difference in results returned, the UK results being for companies based in the UK using uk web hosting. By selecting the right country to host in you are sending another sign to the search engines to let them know how they should categorise your site, and increasing your chances of profitability!