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US vs UK Hosting

mr.sly

mr.sly

mr.sly

Soldato
Joined
25 Jul 2006
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Hi, I'm looking to start up a website for hosting customer websites (HTML, XHTML, Flash ect) and was wondering if there is any disadvantages to US hosting vs UK hosting.

The sites will primarily be local bands and some bands signed to small labels. So the sites will be streaming MP3s, videos and maybe live webcam shows.

A few of the sites I've been looking at:

http://www.bluehost.com/index.html - US Site
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/ds-200_linux/ - UK Site
http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/reseller-h.shtml - UK Site

Is it worth paying the extra money per month?

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks for your time. :)
 
One issue is connection speed/latency. For example, if I ping a UK-based webserver from here in the UK, response is ~20ms while a US-based host is ~150ms. The reverse applies if I ping from the US.

So you need to making a decision on that basis in terms of your intended audience. Naturally US webservers are better for a predominantly US audience, and UK-based better for a UK/European audience. However, though that difference is nearly 10x, it's not that noticeable enough in real terms to the average user browsing a typical website.

Another issue is support. America is ~8 hours behind, so you may not be able to get immediate support response at an appropriate time for a US host. But for non-critical applications, again the difference isn't that significant.

I think you'd be better off with a UK host, simply to offer your audience the best performance, especially with high-bandwidth applications like video.

If you've not seen it already, you might want to check out www.ochostreview.co.uk
 
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Your main concern should be search engines. For example the geographical google.co.uk search. Google uses the websites IP address to determine the location, so if you have a website aimed at a UK audience, you may find it hard to get into google.co.uk listings.

I disagree with the support questions, out of the companies mentioned - Heart and Fasthosts - you'd be lucky to get a 24 response no matter what time of day.

I have two hosting packages, one UK and one US, the UK one is a small company who i work for, and the US one is Linux based and listed in the OcUK review site - dreamhost.

My advice would be to email the hosting companies, ask for their reasons to host with them and not the US/UK. That will give you a good idea of their response time.
 
ok working in the industry myself get asked these questions quite often, all i will say is be careful who you choose

things to consider

Different timezones - so support may be delayed
Company history - a lot of hosts out there are done by little 13 year olds with paypal and no sense of direction and disappear when mummy and daddy cant pay their services
response times - you are talking 80-200ms to the us depending on where abouts within the country,
Price - Dont go for price beleive me, a lot of these hosts from the us like i said are fake and they give such pathetic pricing that chances are you wont get support in anyway possible

the 3 companies you mentioned:-
fasthosts, recently their datacenter got FLOODED! and went offline for a week!
heart internet, not that good from what ive heard
bluehost, never heard of them,

what kind of hosting or services you want to get or want to provide if its just a simple website theres plenty of hosts within the uk
 
uk_viper said:
fasthosts, recently their datacenter got FLOODED! and went offline for a week!
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That's a bit harsh - can't do a huge amount when nature takes over like that. Also, it was a morning or a day at most from what I heard o.o
 
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marc2003 said:
well they've certainly got balls posting this press release if they were down for a week.... :D

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/companyinfo/PressReleases/viewer.asp?article=24Jul2007

hope you're not getting confused with the downtime that was posted about before in another thread recently - this was well before the flooding. :)
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Just remembered what he could be referring to - Fasthosts, iirc, were running from *generator power* for about a week - but that *isn't* downtime.
 
a lot was posted on forum2 relating to the incident and we had a rather large amount of customers come from them recently with the same response saying their server was offline for an entire week
 
Cheers for the replies guys.

I think I'll stay clear of BlueHosts, I've done some looking around and they've got some good reviews. But something doesn't seem right about that price.

I think I'll go with FastHosts as I've heard good things in the past just have to hope there's no more flooding. :) Hopefully support won't be an issue and I'll never have to contact them.
 
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