UK Hosting companies.....

Maybe my standards are too high? Maybe I'm just really unlucky?

But why is it that UK hosting (and I mean hosters, not shared hosting cpanel resellers) is so expensive, but the quality so hit and miss?

We've just taken out a new dedicated server with Heart Internet, less than 2 weeks in, we have our first outage, "a routing issue". Lets hope it's our last

Global Gold that hosts our forum on a VPS have had a number of outages, the latest was today.

Previously we had dedicated servers with UK Fast, holy moly, an experience I never want to go through again. Up an down like a whores drawers... We had to break contract and escape before our outages destroyed us.

Then there are our dedicated servers in the US. They can go for 2 years without any disruption, and if there is an incident anywhere near our kit, they always inform us, even when 99% of the time it has no impact, and we would be none the wiser.

Then to make rub salt into the woods, they give us Rolls Royce service, then go and make everything more than 50% cheaper than we pay in the UK!

Spoke to Rackspace UK the other week. Like for like quote to what we already have in the states, £550 versus £200. Just baffled why the UK is so expensive

All I want is a network bombproof UK hoster who knows about issues before I do and won't try and charge the earth for a ropey entry level server...

I'm thinking Colo may have to be the answer.... question is whose datacentre do I dump our kit? Anyone mention cloud hosting and I'll throttle you

Ok, so maybe a rant. But fair point, or am I just incredibly unlucky?

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No contribution to make to the topic so I'll go off at a tangent!!

If your market is UK based and you're a UK company, does Google penalise you on search if your server isn't UK based, plse? I've heard that's exactly what Google does - but feel the informant must have got it wrong as commercially this approach wouldn't make sense.

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Honestly, that's the biggest load of old cobblers, and yet you hear loads of so called SEO professionals beating their drum over this over a zillion forum threads... spreading confusion and scaremongering.

If you have a country specific domain, eg .co.uk .fr .nz etc, then you can host anywhere from the Isle of Sheppy to Zimbabwe or Iceland and Google couldn't give 2 hoots. Because it will automatically take your TLD (top level domain) location, and assume that your widget.fr website is only relevant to Johhny Frenchman. It couldn't care less where the IP originated from.

Unless.... you are using a non country specific, like .com .net etc, in which case it will factor in your IP location. But you can over ride that in webmaster tools and tell google your content is only for people in Clapton.

I've had flaming wars over this topic on various forums and people get quite emotive but lose sight of reality.

Best example I use is IBM's site. They have a country portal for just about every country in the world. Can you imagine them hosting a web server in every country

I'd happily keep our servers in the US, and we have no problems with indexing or traffic. But I am starting to get concerned over transaction times, which is a geographical reality. Data packets take longer to get to your machine from America than they do from London, and Google is now hotting up on site speed as an algorithm signal.

So I've decided to prove to all the doubting thomas's once and for all by setting up a UK server, and geographically loadbalancing it with the US, until I'm happy the UK is reliable. If we suddenly get even more indexing and traffic, I'll happily be proved wrong, but I very much doubt we'll see any difference other than a faster response time.

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We are a .com but I've told Webmaster Tools we're UK based so that's sorted then ....

Thanks sjr4x4.

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Ok, don't want to confuse you, or go back on what i said, but as you are a .com, then me personally, I would consider getting a .co.uk specific domain if your target audience is only going to be UK.

The reason I say this, is although Google webmaster tools will let you specify location quite happily, other search engines and indexing sites may not have this facility and will assume you are US based. So although Googles god now, if Facebook for example took over the world, then things could change.

So for non Google engines, then domain extension and IP location can and will have a contributing factor.

But if you have a .co.uk (or any country specific) then you can host on the dark side of the moon, IP location will never be an issue. Only serious things to consider are reliability and (as in our case) transaction times.

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Ok a couple of months in, we now have a catastrophic failure of MLS

Even better, no techies are available to investigate tonight, so we have to wait until tomorrow morning.... meanwhile our site is down!

Box has been up and down all day, so I do a reboot, and bizarrely somehow another server seems to have come back in it's place!!! Our URL shows us at a Cpanel warning page, which is great, as MLS doesn't even have cpanel installed!

Right deep breaths... shall see what tomorrow brings, but looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and move to Rackspace, even if they are ridiculously expensive.

While MLS was US based, we went years with out issue, a few months based in the UK, problem after problem, which is why we left the UK in the first place

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Again off the main topic but it's a pressing current issue for us ...

Any advice plse from anywhere on what would be a "reasonable" price (excluding VAT) to pay for web hosting?

I don't like the cloud concept and our web host could expect to be asked the odd daft question (eg we've got a pingback notification on the site, should I approve it?). We've a small wordpress site (c.51 pages, 5 email addresses). Naturally, we want close to total reliability and a contactable human being in case of problems.

Hoping to hear from you ......

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All depends on what you're after, dedicated server or shared?

Shared is tuppence hapenny from a zillion providers. Quality varies widely, and a lot of shared offerings have their servers overloaded. Also you are at the mercy of the other websites on the same server as you.

Personally I prefer dedicated servers, as you have more control. UK wise prices seem to vary from £200 pm from 2nd tier providers to £500 pm from 1st tier like Rackspace.

You also have things like VPS's as a halfway house, purely down to requirements and preference.

Unfortunately, unable to actually recommend anyone at the moment...

But our sites back up after a 12 hour outage... Shall see what our hosters have to say for themselves tomorrow after getting a "your sites back, let me know if any more probs..." response.

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I'm after shared (from a zillion providers). Now I've a better understanding of the question I've asked, I can see why it's almost impossible to answer it!

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Problem is, anyone can open a reseller account with a hosting provider, put up a shiny website, and they then become a "hosting provider". A lot of them are actually sat on shared servers, that then are dividing up space again, so you can get multiple resellers on the same physical server. You can literally have thousands of websites on a single server.

Not necessarily a problem, as 99% of websites generate little load and use minimum resources, but if it's not set up properly and one of those websites starts looping database requests or grows out of control, then it can in some instances bring down the whole pack of cards. I know, <ahem> because I did just this in our early days, and kept bringing everyones website down as we played with our database, and in the end, the hoster asked us politely to leave

Me personally, I like to use hosting providers who actually own their own data centre, as opposed to renting off someone else, downside is these hosters tend to be more expensive. But there are plenty decent rent a box hosters, just a minefield trying to find one

Best bet is to ask who everyone else uses..

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