Does location matter?

[realestate]

If my customers are in US, should my host be in US for faster connection to my site?

[imaginemn]

It really depends. I would say it really helps, mainly because of routine maintenance of the servers. I have a few clients in Australia, China, Singapore and I used to run into issues with my hosting provider bringing down the server for routine maintenance around 4:00 - 5:00 AM for short periods of time. The problem was that our host assumed that is was ok to do it on when they consider low peak times, unfortunatly my night time is their day time. It was mostly on late Sunday nights when this occurred, which was another problem because Sunday is actually Monday for my clients. So I would assume the same thing would happen just in reverse. It was a mess.

If your Web site is just a "online presence" type of site then it probably doesn't matter. It will also depend on your host, because closer does not necessarily mean faster.

imaginemn

[awall19]

some regional search results can also look at host country and give sites a boost in local results.

[Jony]

For the main part I would say not really. Although, I have read articles in the paper about googles future where they plan on having searches localized through a complicated routing system. In short, Later on when someone searches for say contractors or painter, it may bring up local result because they are more relevant and will/could hinder your clients being first on the search engines.