Host Site in Own Country or the US?
Does anyone have any advice or recommendations for those of us not based in the USA, on whether to host your site in our own country or in the US?
I am based in New Zealand. According to our tax department there can be some dispute on where an e-commerce style business is deemed to be operating for tax purposes. The location where the site is hosted can sometimes be considered the location where business is taking place and where you are liable for tax. If I set up my business as a New Zealand equivalent of an LLC and have the site hosted in the USA there is risk of double taxation. While NZ does have a 'double taxation agreement' with the US I would really prefer not to deal with two tax departments (one is bad enough!).
I could host in NZ, but it is more expensive and the services offer less bandwidth/storage compared to US options. Most of my target market is likely to be outside of New Zealand, so another downside is that there will be latency (slow performance) issues with hosting in NZ compared to the US for most visitors to the site.
Thoughts? Anyone been through this and can advise?
Thanks Brendon
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Answers
I'm not a lawyer/accountant but I doubt there is anyone paying tax twice even if for some crazy reason your meant to.
Check out http://www.bigcommerce.com/ as Aus company. I been checking our my friends store back end on their it is one sweet system. They are hosted in multiple USA datacentres I think.
Latency is typically a non issue if you host in the US, it's possible to speed up your website a lot on the front end rather than better web hosts. It's not economical to host websites in Australia, I imagine even less so in NZ.
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