> > Why? If they're not hosting it in-house, why does it matter where on > the globe it is? Request latency due to distance and intermediate hops. The shorter the distance and fewer hops the faster those little images, stylesheets, and various other embedded media will load. This won't be very noticeable on the first page load due to the download times, but other requests that check timestamps against cache will appear more sluggish than necessary.
It's also more fault tolerent. I don't imagine this ever happening, but if the UK was somehow cut off from all other countries internet system, then the UK customers would still be able to access sites in the UK, but not sites outside of the UK. It's one less thing that can go wrong.
