Recently I've seen a couple of articles on the relationship between the location of your web host and how well you rank on certain locale specific search engines.
For instance, if you are a Canadian company looking to sell your product in Canada, you might do well to have your site hosted with a Canadian hosting company. It appears that search engines such as google.ca use the location of the server to indicate relevance on their searches.
Recently I entered an SEO contest and did quite well, spending most of the contest in the top 3 in google.com. However, even though I am a Canadian, and I mentioned the location and even did a blog entry on my contest site about being Canadian, I did not rank in the top 10 on google.ca presumably because of my choice of web hosts.
Canada web hosting can be hard to find though and often times even though you find a Canadian company offering hosting with servers in Canada, you are still billed in U.S. funds and the rates are not terribly reasonable.
I located PrimeHost.ca and found that they not only bill in Canadian funds, accept various payment methods, and have online ordering, their rates are reasonable as well.
Definitely worth a mention.
