deconstruction

I thought this too, but i added a .co.uk to a US site and google via seo and adwords thought of it as a US site.

I added site to google webmaster and said this is a UK site, next day it was fine.

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FagEnd

I thought there would be an SEO benefit with UK servers, but all my sites are hosted in Texas with hostgator now, and I see no probs with rankings for UK domains. I'm seeing that the extension matters, and server location does not.

expertc

I only use US based hosting for all my sites, no problem with SEO, GEO Locations, etc. Prices are in US$ and if paying by GBP it's impossible to resist

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MrMason

This is a bit like comparing a Ferrari with a Ford Fiesta,

We have the same situation recently though with a customer who moved from ThePlanet to Krystal. So US to UK. After the move, pretty much everyone including Asian, North American, South America and of course Europe noted that the speed of the website was noticeably faster.

UKFast, as previously discussed in other posts are not fast, and FASTHOSTS servers are so overcrowded pages seem to take an age to load.

We have many customers who move to our hosting after hosting in the US, and are amazed at the speed increase. This then increases revenue with their customers as they aren't waiting 5+ seconds to load pages. There is also a large difference in download speeds if you are serving files/video. Getting any decent speed across the Atlantic is somewhat difficult and you'll tend to find file downloads less than the 300kb/second mark on average (from our experience).

As a rule of thumb, we advise anyone who asks us where to host their website in accordance to who is visiting it. If your audience is in Europe, then host in the UK or the Netherlands. If it's mostly America, then host in the US.

1) It's really not worth the price difference to slow your customers down. Speed === Sales, there are many studies that suggest this. When you can host your site with a decent webhost in the UK for £25/year, why penny pinch?

2) Get support in your own timezome. This can be pretty important, unless your host is running 24/7 support - and even then are you speaking to a first level support tech, or can you speak to someone who can actually help you ?

3) No one really knows about the effects of SEO - but again for the negligible price difference, is it worth the risk?

If you only take price into consideration when purchasing the tools to do your business with then yes I guess it's impossible to resist

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expertc

Nope, not only price… One of my hosting companies is a US-based company (Site5), I have a reseller package with them for more than 8 years now. They use to be a small host but now use The Planet servers. And you know what, talking about support, I get a response from them within 2-5 minutes ANYTIME day or night. Extra IP address – no problem, because I am an “old” customer, I might even get it for free and setup within hours on my request. SSL, root access, you name it. Haven’t seen any silly limits like “get 20 mail addresses for all your business needs…”. Duh, I put as many addresses as I want, subdomain goes live instantly, etc. They migrated me to a new server while keeping old one running and synched, so the downtime was … zero. I have had bad experience with the UK-based hosts, sorry. Almost every extra request was followed by NO, we can’t do it or it’s going to cost you. To get beyond 1st level support, where you realise that the person does not understand what you are talking about, was a daunting task. Maybe now it’s different, but, you know, better safe than sorry.

BTW, I am in no sense associated with the Site5 and have other US hosting plans as well, this was just an example.

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MrMason

They sound like an excellent company, I wish there was more of them (and us) and less of all the people who say NO to simple requests, or have so many added extras that you end up spending more money on extras than your original plan

There also needs to be more people like yourself who will write good reviews for good companies, as people only generally heard bad things about bad companies!

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expertc

Thanks! I do appreciate your approach to the “review”, written about your (direct or indirect) competitor. Haven’t seen much of it, refreshing… I do host lots of sites both for clients and myself so should keep an eye on all new hosting solutions.

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nickynoodles

If you're doing anything online (UK) that generates, say, >£25 income a month, I can see no reason not to get a UK VPS, or at the very good UK shared hosting with a dedicated IP.

Who wants to share an IP / resources with 6000 other crappy sites, some of them no doubt spammers, and almost certainly 'adult' domains.

Google is now factoring in response time to both organic rankings and PPC placement.

I would argue that if you're on shared hosting you're not really serious about what you're doing.

/me ducks

Skinner

I find the US is generally cheaper for masses of bandwidth and diskspace on the face of it, but they oversell like you would not believe, leaving you with very limited memory. Servage for example (when I used them), give your PHP Scripts about 8mb memory, before killing it. So anything with meat in it will bite the dust instantly, meaning if your site is dynamic, don't waste your time.

One of the main reasons I use the UK for any large sites, mostly because I can send a 32gb Memory Stick (USB) to my hosting company and say "Hey can you walk the 100 yards to the cage, stick this in the USB and copy the content to XYZ folder for me please", and its done. 10gb files uploaded even off a 2mb up stream would take days constantly going.

I was recently talked into cloud hosting by James at Rackspace Cloud Sites Pricing from Rackspace Cloud Hosting, this is certainly a viable option for anyone who wants the best of all worlds, will deliver decent speed the world over.

Edit: I haven't used the Cloud Hosting yet, as its low on my list.

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expertc

People, I do understand your point about the UK hosting. I would gladly go for it as well but… when I last time did something for a customer (respected B2B) we needed quick campaign with email traceability, so the simple request was, something like 120-130 extra disposable addresses to get it through. What we went through, it’s a separate story: first the host asked for like £20 a months for that disposable set with a year contract (???), then we were told that it will take 5 working days, etc.,etc.

I simply pointed MX record to one of my shared hosting plans and voila, everything is done.

Now, tell me, why any company would try to squeeze out extra pennies for something that should simply be free. Whenever I’ve asked for anything from UK based hosts (whatever small!) – extra payment and 5 working days. I don’t know, maybe it is different now, but I don’t want to risk it.

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