Hosting in the US v UK

Gobbledegeek · 1 Mar 2006 at 11:24

I have been told a few times that hosting in the US while generally cheaper, is slower than it's UK counterpart. Also would it not be difficult and costly to get hold of support should a problem arise? What are the pros and cons between US and UK hosting?

Adz · 1 Mar 2006 at 11:53

Increased latency means that transaction based protocols (http, ftp, pop3, imap, smtp, etc) are noticeably slower on anything but a dialup connection.

Hosting a UK site in the US may also have an impact on your search engine placement - for instance, searching for a site with a 'UK site' in Google will yield no results if the site has a GTLD domain and is hosted in the US. Something to bear in mind.

Cost benefits are negligible - for the most part only evident due to massive overselling from the US providers just to be able to compete. It's a very crowded market. Unless you need 50GB of space and 5000GB data transfer for $10/year, I doubt you'll find the US providers any more attractive than their UK counterparts.

As for getting hold of support, if you choose a decent provider, that shouldn't be an issue.

Note that a lot of UK based hosts lease dedicated servers from US based providers for cost reasons.

Last but not least, check out www.ochostreview.co.uk for some reviews. I'll shortly be adding a small icon showing where the company's servers are located which should prove useful.

Beansprout · 1 Mar 2006 at 11:57

I woudn't go for a company who is based in a foreign company and whose support isn't 24/7. And telephone support would be more expensive unless you used something like Dialwise which is 1p/min

The big hosts like Dreamhost and Site5 have great reputations and are far better value for money than possibly any other host on Earth....but the huge amounts of disk space and bandwidth mean something else, ie server CPU usage, is usually heavily limited.

As for speed, ~80ms extra latency which is very noticable if running a games server - games want the lowest ping times possible - but apart from that, no huge differences.

Edit: Darn, knew I'd forget a couple of things

Gobbledegeek · 1 Mar 2006 at 12:07

Adz said:
Increased latency means that transaction based protocols (http, ftp, pop3, imap, smtp, etc) are noticeably slower on anything but a dialup connection.

Hosting a UK site in the US may also have an impact on your search engine placement - for instance, searching for a site with a 'UK site' in Google will yield no results if the site has a GTLD domain and is hosted in the US. Something to bear in mind.

Cost benefits are negligible - for the most part only evident due to massive overselling from the US providers just to be able to compete. It's a very crowded market. Unless you need 50GB of space and 5000GB data transfer for $10/year, I doubt you'll find the US providers any more attractive than their UK counterparts.

As for getting hold of support, if you choose a decent provider, that shouldn't be an issue.

Note that a lot of UK based hosts lease dedicated servers from US based providers for cost reasons.

Last but not least, check out www.ochostreview.co.uk for some reviews. I'll shortly be adding a small icon showing where the company's servers are located which should prove useful.

I have been having a good read already, thanks. Location details would be useful. Thanks.

NathanE · 1 Mar 2006 at 12:21

Adz you should add another column to indicate if the company has Linux or Windows hosting, or both. It'd be very useful.

Adz · 1 Mar 2006 at 12:26

NathanE said:
Adz you should add another column to indicate if the company has Linux or Windows hosting, or both. It'd be very useful.

It's a nice idea but the problem is that it would require manual intervention either by me or the person submitting the review. Both options leave themselves open to errors/omissions. I guess we could make it wiki style so that everyone can contribute/edit the listing but that has its own inherent issues.

Beansprout said:
As for speed, ~80ms extra latency which is very noticable if running a games server - games want the lowest ping times possible - but apart from that, no huge differences.

Not huge but very noticeable even to the average user checking their email with Outlook Express. Even more so if, for instance, you have a folder with a large number of small files that you wish to upload to your hosting space. There's also of course download speeds to consider.