Permabanned
- Joined
- 9 Aug 2008
- Posts
- 35,711
New website, need a good host...
- Thread starter slipd
- Start date
Same here. The UK is still pretty far behind other countries like the US. You only have to look at the bandwidth you really get (often need to check T&C to see the real bandwidth) to come to the conclusion the UK is not the place to host websites that might become successful.
I went with hostgator for not much other reason than I'd used them before years ago and the spec was good for the money.
Maybe guys, but phone up and speak to a real person at TSO or Vida and get real customer service. I've had reports from both where they have gone over and above to get a problem sorted...
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 May 2007
- Posts
- 3,896
- Location
- Bristol
Yeah, for the sake of a few pounds, I'd much rather support a UK company, rather than an American one. Not to mention that if my target audience is in the UK, I'd much rather have a UK based server.
I call the USA hosts I use on their support number and and get real customer support, my current one Amerinoc have real 24/7 support staff both online and via phone. There are only two real problems with hosting, slow servers or downtime so you should not need to be calling them too often it at all. In my opinion UK hosting just isn't up to it unless you are paying serious money.
It isn't just a few pounds, it is reliability. Target audience?? Mine is also UK and it makes zero difference using a USA host
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 May 2007
- Posts
- 3,896
- Location
- Bristol
Well, I've never had a problem with my host, and I don't pay a great amount for my hosting.
If there was zero difference, companies like Google and Facebook wouldn't need to bother having server farms all over the world. They'd just have a few for redundancy and they'd be located wherever was cheapest.
So you know your site is up 100% or say 99.99% of the time and you know it isn't slower loading at certain times? I dare say you pop on and check it from time to time but do you really know and would you if it had a problem or downtime?
Of course they still would and don't be silly, you think Google needs to spread it's data centers in order to manipulate its own searches
I rank very well for my keywords, several #1 spots and all on USA servers but if you want to believe hosting in the UK will get you better serps then carry on, I am not arguing with you.
So you know your site is up 100% or say 99.99% of the time and you know it isn't slower loading at certain times? I dare say you pop on and check it from time to time but do you really know and would you if it had a problem or downtime?
Of course they still would and don't be silly, you think Google needs to spread it's data centers in order to manipulate its own searches
I rank very well for my keywords, several #1 spots and all on USA servers but if you want to believe hosting in the UK will get you better serps then carry on, I am not arguing with you.
tracking uptime is easy nowadays. you don't have to manually check anything, web services are here for you to do that and compile the data into nice friendly reports on uptime and speeds.
I'll put bets on good US hosts offering better uptime and faster cpu intensive hosting than the UK. The market is just so much bigger there. Economies of scale have kicked in allowing for much cheaper running costs. UK Gov has all but throttled the UK from growing its net infrastructure and pricing of the smaller market here reflects that.
In short, if you want beefier servers for lower prices serving your sites faster to your customers/visitors then the US is the place to go. And yep, the US will serve faster than the UK even when your visitors are in the UK.
The US is the place to go if you want an "all you can eat" style hosting experience. The McDonalds of the hosting world, if you will.
That's just an outright lie.
The government has nothing to do with the bandwidth or connectivity offered by UK based hosting providers. In fact, you'll find that transit in London is cheaper than almost anywhere else in the world because of the prevalence of carrier neutral datacentres and the proximity of carriers (especially in E14).
Primarily, you'll find the US hosts offering far more than they can realistically offer, because the culture for overselling is so much more ingrained.
Last edited:
The US is the place to go if you want an "all you can eat" style hosting experience. The McDonalds of the hosting world, if you will.
That's just an outright lie.
The government has nothing to do with the bandwidth or connectivity offered by UK based hosting providers. In fact, you'll find that transit in London is cheaper than almost anywhere else in the world because of the prevalence of carrier neutral datacentres and the proximity of carriers (especially in E14).
Primarily, you'll find the US hosts offering far more than they can realistically offer, because the culture for overselling is so much more ingrained.
It's not a lie about speed, it's an opinion and one I think holds up as a good rule of thumb. I'm sure you can get faster hosting if you pay more but when taking the cost into account, the US offers faster hosting because the market as I've already said is HUGE. You seem to be struggling with this so I'll break it down for you. Company A has 1000 servers in the US, company B has 10 in the UK. Company A can negotiate a better price on those servers, they can offer far more performance for a better price than company B can even hope of doing. And when you're talking about sites that are predominantly CMS based gobbling up CPU like no tomorrow, this is a big deal. Company A will serve your site faster even when Company B are in the same country as the visitor because they are serving the pages faster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale This might help you understand it better than my amateur self can explain.
Now as far as companies offering more than they can deliver. I think you're talking mainly of the reseller market there. That's actually a bigger problem in the UK as UK hosts try to offer "unlimited" and again, economies of scale prevent them from being able to buy big enough to offer more bandwidth. And bandwidth is now cheap, VERY cheap in the US. Processing power is the just as much a factor in the speed of hosting as bandwidth is. The US offer more of both for less money. Which obviously means you can buy into faster servers that are going to be less saturated than UK ones, unless you're dealing with bad hosts who are overloading their shared servers. So whether you're talking about dedicated or shared hosting the US dominates. I'm a brit who hates to have to type that but its true.
Now as for UK gov not holding business back online. That's a daft thought that you sound like you should know better than to suggest. We've only really just got over metered communications here. We have a virtual monopoly on the infrastructure that the gov has done nothing about. It was only through hard campaigning that we got metered communications squashed when the rest of the world was allowing business to thrive online, in particular the US who have invested in communications for decades before our gov even worked out what email was. The US was laying cable 40 years before us in the UK. The UK still hasn't got broadband coverage for the entire country, a tiny country i might add iand its 2011. That's holding business back and don't get me started on the problems the UK has to face compared to the US. In 2000 20% of UK business being done online was through US websites. Today the largest financial and business services are all American. These are the services were using here in the UK. Paypal, Google, Yahoo, facebook, it's all US based. If it's not based on sending real objects around, or in other words, if its a web service, the US dominates and it does so because the market has been allowed to thrive there with US gov support, free competition between providers unlike our ugly monopoly here.
I don't run a download server, therefore I'd rather have a UK based server with excellent latency rather than an american server with tonnes of useless bandwidth and comparatively terrible latency.
Also, you're forgetting that data from the US needs to travel trans-atlantic. I just ran a speedtest on an american based server and got a measly 5Mb/s and a ping of 130+. I ran one on a London based server and got maximum 50.5Mb/s with a ping of 9.
Also, you're forgetting that data from the US needs to travel trans-atlantic. I just ran a speedtest on an american based server and got a measly 5Mb/s and a ping of 130+. I ran one on a London based server and got maximum 50.5Mb/s with a ping of 9.
Last edited:
Man of Honour
- Joined
- 31 Jan 2004
- Posts
- 16,338
- Location
- Plymouth
Indeed - TCP handles latency badly. And I don't think anyone can argue with physics - the speed of light dictates the latency between the end user and host, which is why large companies invest in CDNs.
With UK hosting available from £15/year or so I don't see why anyone would host further away from their visitors than necessary. In the US you can probably obtain high-spec dedicated servers cheaper (Softlayer are pretty good), but then in the UK there's Rapidswitch.
With UK hosting available from £15/year or so I don't see why anyone would host further away from their visitors than necessary. In the US you can probably obtain high-spec dedicated servers cheaper (Softlayer are pretty good), but then in the UK there's Rapidswitch.
You can't argue with physics I agree, but you can skip any defence of most of the points I raised it seems. So, physics it is then. The speed of light does not dictate the latency between the end user and the host. The route taken dictates that. The speed is only as fast as the slowest server in the chain and since the internet works by routing data around servers that you have no control over, you can't actually predict anything about latency over the web. You'd need FTP to establish real speeds.
Also, a big shock for you might be that most UK businesses are hosted outside the UK and rely on web services that are also outside of the UK. Remember my comment about 20 percent of UK businesses were running through the US in 2000? that figure sky rocketed over the last decade. A lot of the big UK hosts even don't have their servers in the UK. 1&1 for instance are hosted in germany i believe and they are a huge uk host.
This is a mute point though really as the majority of UK sites aren't actually targetting brits exclusively. Most sites hosted in the UK want traffic from everywhere but forgetting that obvious point. It's still true that the majority of hosted sites are done so dynamically. The webserver where the site is hosted isn't just serving static pages, it's using the cpu to create those pages on the fly and this is the main bottleneck as here we can run into seconds serving pages, not milliseconds sending it transatlantic.
I guess you've got your heart set on championing the UK for hosting so I'll just leave it at hosting static sites purely aimed at a UK audience in the UK with a reliable host that actually has its servers in the UK is probably your best bet. There, the UK wins
Well with exhaustive testing like that we can safely conclude that its not possible to get speeds in excess of 5mb/s outside the UK. Not sure how I manage 20. The UK wins again, no contest.
I have used Site5 previously, their customer support is good. A couple of months ago I moved away from them to a company called Immediate VPS and had very little downtime.
Immediate VPS servers are located in Germany and I have had very little downtime. You can choose from a various range of operating systems and some of the packages come with free DirectAdmin and cPanel is available for an extra fee.
If the site doesn't use much resources I'd be happy to host it for free. Obviously I can't guarantee uptime etc.
Immediate VPS servers are located in Germany and I have had very little downtime. You can choose from a various range of operating systems and some of the packages come with free DirectAdmin and cPanel is available for an extra fee.
If the site doesn't use much resources I'd be happy to host it for free. Obviously I can't guarantee uptime etc.
Last edited: