Hosting where?

tom-thebox

What country do you host your website in? Please select you choice on the pole.

louie

for the sake a few euro i prefer Ireland (Blacknight.ie - no doubt one of the best), cause when I am up they are up as well, and i could ring the guys if problems occur.

PowerHouseDan

Yeah i have Always used Irish Servers

nikimere

doteasy.com - america
simply because you get UNLIMITED bandwidth and 20GB of space for €90 a year. and they have excellent support.
also because i do most of my web work at night when all the irish guys are finished and america is in full swing.

on another note: thats between you and blacknight - nobody here cares

the Guru

I use Irish servers (blacknight) and I think they are excellent and extremely helpful

jmcc

nikimere wrote:

doteasy.com - america
simply because you get UNLIMITED bandwidth

No such thing. It is just something to attract the gullible into thinking that they are getting a better deal on their hosting package. The reality is that most sites do not get much traffic beyond search engine spidering. These hosting companies base it on most sites never using their bandwidth allocation. It is commonly called "overselling".

Regards...jmcc

tom-thebox

Good man jmcc, lets stay on topic folks. Will be interesting to see whos hositng where and why

mneylon

Ireland - obviously

smeggle

Irish based windows servers from webhost.ie - for small business servers of upto 500mb and for support, far as I'm concerned no other Irish based host compares and I'm including pricing there.

American server - New account and left with the reality of little or no comparable choice in Ireland. Go above 500mb's/10gigs bandwidth and Irish prices go into orbit..

Just another part of Rip off Ireland when you get above 500megs Small Business Servers..

jjmax

I used to be hosted in the states but found it unreliable and slow.
I'm using Blacknight (Ireland) now and happy I made the move.

steve-hosting36

smeggle wrote:

Irish based windows servers from webhost.ie - for small business servers of upto 500mb and for support, far as I'm concerned no other Irish based host compares and I'm including pricing there.

American server - New account and left with the reality of little or no comparable choice in Ireland. Go above 500mb's/10gigs bandwidth and Irish prices go into orbit..

Just another part of Rip off Ireland when you get above 500megs Small Business Servers..

Just out of interest (since..... dont try to advertise again) - what makes you think Irish prices are any worse than anywhere else in the world?

nikimere

jmcc wrote:

most sites do not get much traffic

you said it... "most sites"
for me i used to pay quite a big of money when i ran over bandwidth allocations... but with doteasy, like i ALREADY said it is unmetered so i have never paid an extra penny.

steve-hosting36

Most unmetered deals have clauses in the T&C's about extreme usage. Out of interest, what is your traffic level at the moment?

Figment

I host in Ireland with both Hosting365 and Blacknight. It have proved invaluable in the past when problems cropped up.
As a matter of interest does any other hoster give you the option of hosting in Ireland?

Serbian

I host in Ireland with Blacknight and Hosting365. I also host in America with Dreamhost, but I just use it as online storage and for testing things out (it only costs $30 a year but it's very slow and a bit unreliable).

tom-thebox

Jmcc did you have ball park figures a while back (2 or 3 years now) of the % of irish sites hosted outside the country?

smeggle

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Most unmetered deals have clauses in the T&C's about extreme usage. Out of interest, what is your traffic level at the moment?

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Just out of interest (since..... dont try to advertise again) - what makes you think Irish prices are any worse than anywhere else in the world?

I'm assuming both of those comments were in reply to my comment? I've placed them together for ease

Well first allthough they say 'Unmetered' when the account data transfer limit is checked it has 1tb limit in place. Currently I'm averaging approx 1k - 2k uniques pr month. About 150k+ hits. Bear in mind that I am restricting usage at the moment as I'm still getting everything working so most users at the moment are only beta testers really. I have been warned in preliminary discussions that if I go above 10% pr mnth I will have to switch to a dedicated server. By that time and as I intend to anyway, that won't be a problem. I should be switching by the time I'm pushing 7-8% anyway.

As for the pricing well, that account cost me the same as a basic 500mb/10gig bandwidth account in Ireland. The account is 15gigs/unmetered bandwidth (See explanation above).

So for the same price I pay in Ireland I can get 29times more space and every plan I checked had upto or over 30times more bandwidth. I will be a heavy user as I'll be able to do podcasting/video/audio and maybe streams. Least thats what is planned. (The site is 'G' rated and will be fully monitored and has just instigated an pre-emptive 'Anti - Cyber Bullying Policy').

Recently I hosted my linux based stuff with an Irish webhost. I still retain there services for my windows stuff and also they look after my DNS as well. I've been with them for a number of years now and sorry, no offence intended, I have yet to find a comparable service in Ireland in terms of pricing especially. There plans aimed towards the small business offer way more to the user in terms of services and I can personally vouch that there support turnaround is exceptional and the support given 1st class.

(Thats not to say that other hosts such as yourself are lacking in this area, I have no knowledge of that as such as I have not hosted with you or other Irish based hosts and as such can only say how I found my current host's support level).

However when pricing across three of the main players, there package for small business hosting is the most competitive in terms of space offered, services offered and bandwidth. The only downside is that there servers can be slow sometimes but other than that, 1st class as I say.

As for pricing worldwide Ireland in general comes out at 1.5 to twice as expensive across the board for there standard hosting packages. Dedicated server pricing is through the roof and I think the cheapest Irish based host at 60gigs/100gigs bandwidth was something like 2k? or just under. I could near enough get two cluster servers for that in the States or 1 definately. Rackspace are currently around $1200, though dreamhost for the same were around $600us (60gig/300gigs bw).

In comparable terms with Europe based hosting the same applies. It's easy enough to research most of this stuff by using Google but that can throw up a lot of cowboys so I use other webmaster forums for recommendations. This tends to return the more professional competant host, like yourselves but it also shows that Irish pricing in comparable terms are high..

I use places like THIS as well.

Heres a couple of examples
Denmark:
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/Country/
500mb space unlimited traffic (yeah we know that one), unlimted e-mail, all the usual services sql, php etc @ 1.25euro pr mnth plus 12euro set-up.

U.K.
http://www.1and1.co.uk
Price is higher at 7.19 sterling pr mnth but you get 3 .co.uk domains 2.5gigs space and 20gigs traffic. This is there business package, basic hosting is 800mb space/10gigs traffic @ 3.99 sterling pr mnth (about 5.00euro)

Germany
http://www.1und1.de
There page says it all really [url=http://www.1und1.info/xml/order/WebHosting;jsessionid=2ED43A7362AD2BA8487F7CD0D74033FA.TC33b?__rd=ac1704c6JMV59XvAQz2ZhYwF9CsaHKJr&origin[site]=MX.EUE.DE&origin[page]=index&ucuoId=MX.EUE.DE-20060510001326-ac1704c5bO3xFCASODPUjN6WSi0Hdwmo-S1]1und1 hosting plans[/url]
(Granted e-mail accounts are limited here)

In fairness though France from what I've seen are worse but not by much really. The examples are again in fairness very big players in there respective countries but those examples show there is a big disparity in pricing.

That said though, personally I would prefer to host in Ireland. I live here and as such would rather support Irish traders but only if the pricing was more realistic.

OK Understandable, there is a lot more users in say the U.K. but the same cannot be said of Denmark which in terms of size/population is more comparable to Ireland and it's one of the Nordic circle of Countries, who are renowned for there high pricing structures. I did research this and tried my damndest to stay with Irish based hosts but when faced with the reality of the situation, regretfully I was left with little choice.

I don't think the fault here lies with the actuall hosts themselves but more with the current infrastructure they have to manage. You can have the best data centre in the world with all the bells and whistles but if the infrastructure is not there to support it then it's useless. Most of that infra structure is ran by Eircom and there track record in all areas leaves a lot to be desired, (trying to be kind ).

So, that in itself leaves major hosts like yourself in the position that you have to off set your higher costs to the client or switch your server clusters to the likes of Rackspace or some such other dedicated cluster server hosting. Defeats the object really though does that, of Irish based data centres.

Like I say, in fairness, in that area I do symapthise but sympathy has no place in business and as such was left with no other option but to switch to off shore hosting.

That doesn't mean I won't monitor the situation and if I do find a competitive Irish based host I will return to Irish hosts as my first preference. Pricing would be a major factor in that decision though.


nb: I've purposely left the names of the 3 Irish hosts blank. Think thats fair all round to them.

Ziycon

nikimere wrote:

doteasy.com - america
simply because you get UNLIMITED bandwidth and 20GB of space for €90 a year. and they have excellent support.
also because i do most of my web work at night when all the irish guys are finished and america is in full swing.

on another note: thats between you and blacknight - nobody here cares

There based in Canada, doubt it makes any diff. though.

steve-hosting36

Hi Smeggle,.

No disrespect, but your information on the irish industry is quite out of date.

For one, we actually own and operate our own DC and have gig-e fiber links around Dublin and to London for transit and peering. We are competetive with most UK / US and European hosts and certainly kill most other Irish players on price.

From my last post, we do Windows plans (MOD note: please stop advertising your prices). Importantly, this also includes a huge range of features, database support, multi-domain support and local freephone support. (from your own examples, this compares well with 1and1, etc)

On the server side, we do dedicated Celeron servers with 10Mbps unmetered connections (approx 3000GB per month) from just € 59.95 per month - again with 24/7 local support, etc.

Ireland was once a high cost area for hosting - but not really any more...

GoneShootin

I generally host with MyHost.ie - whome I believe get their hosting from the UK. I think you need to make the question more specific tom. We could all be hosted with Irish companies, but **** knows where they actually get their hosting space and bandwidth from.

mneylon

GoneShootin wrote:

We could all be hosted with Irish companies, but **** knows where they actually get their hosting space and bandwidth from.

Only a small number of Irish hosting companies own their own hardware and manage their own infrastructure / network to any degree.

If you look at the number of Irish hosting companies that are members of RIPE and INEX it can give you some indicator............

Of course price isn't everything...

Ph3n0m

blacknight wrote:

Only a small number of Irish hosting companies own their own hardware and manage their own infrastructure / network to any degree.

If you look at the number of Irish hosting companies that are members of RIPE and INEX it can give you some indicator............

Of course price isn't everything...

Unfortunately price/diskspace/bandwidth are the immediate forethoughts for most people

Yes we can argue about the benefits of hosting in Ireland, local support, etc.

But for the poor and otherwise, hosting outside of Ireland is more viable and financially pleasing option

That said, I do all my hosting in Ireland

AngryAnderson

I have a dedicated server with H365. The support can be a bit slow but they're helpful, know their stuff and always get the problem solved. I used WebHost.ie for shared hosting accounts also and they've been great too - particularly their support response times.

smeggle

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Hi Smeggle,.

No disrespect, but your information on the irish industry is quite out of date.

For one, we actually own and operate our own DC and have gig-e fiber links around Dublin and to London for transit and peering. We are competetive with most UK / US and European hosts and certainly kill most other Irish players on price.

From my last post, we do Windows plans (MOD note: please stop advertising your prices). Importantly, this also includes a huge range of features, database support, multi-domain support and local freephone support. (from your own examples, this compares well with 1and1, etc)

On the server side, we do dedicated Celeron servers with 10Mbps unmetered connections (approx 3000GB per month) from just € 59.95 per month - again with 24/7 local support, etc.

Ireland was once a high cost area for hosting - but not really any more...

hmm - I see you have recently changed your pricing structure. Last time I checked them they were a lot higher than that, about a couple of months ago. (You've changed the site as well - looks nicer and easier to use ).

As for your gig-e fibre connection? Well thats good for Dublin/London but what happens when you get outside of those areas? Your back to square one with a poor infra structure. Yes you'll have brilliant responce times in the major city area and thats good for the main corparate business's within that sphere but can the same be said for out side those areas still awaiting even basic line upgrades?

I'm wondering if the current pricing you have is in direct responce to that new hosting company that came out at the beginning of the year and slashed the .ie domain price along with 999mb space/100gigs bw packages?

Nice to see that someone is finally trying to address this issue and bring the hosting pricing structure into a more competitive arena. Maybe it will be what is needed to entice those that have previously hosted with Irish hosts bot were forced to change to off-shore hosting due to the abysmal pricing structures previously and currently (In some cases) in force.

rsynnott

Rented server with Hosting365.

seamus

Ireland again here.

As Figment points out, having the host operating on your timeframe when there's a problem is a godsend.

There's also the problem that any downtime (when necessary) tends to occur overnight (when it's assumed there'll be less traffic). If you're hosting twelve hours away, then assuming your primary audience is Irish/European, your downtime occurs during your site's peak hours.

While the Irish hosting market was largely overpriced for a good while, prices across the board have shot down in the last 12-18 months, well comparable and even less than prices in the UK and US.
I assume this is probably to do with an overall plummet in bandwidth costs in this country, and a larger volume of Irish websites coming online to take advantage of the increase in broadband in the consumer's home.

seamus

smeggle wrote:

As for your gig-e fibre connection? Well thats good for Dublin/London but what happens when you get outside of those areas? Your back to square one with a poor infra structure. Yes you'll have brilliant responce times in the major city area and thats good for the main corparate business's within that sphere but can the same be said for out side those areas still awaiting even basic line upgrades?

Sorry smeggle, I'm struggling to see the relevance here. How does bandwidth availability to the consumer affect a host's abilty to give good service?

mneylon

seamus wrote:

Sorry smeggle, I'm struggling to see the relevance here. How does bandwidth availability to the consumer affect a host's abilty to give good service?

I don't see how it's relevant either....

steve-hosting36

The customer's end isn't really relevent to the hosting provision - what matters is that the host has good tier-1 backbone links as well as excellent local and international peering - to ensure the best possible latency to the maximum number of users.

Webmonkey

Germany simply cause I don't have the money to pay irish hosts. If I did i would probably go with the irish alright.

Servage.net - > Excellent features and excellent support.

steve-hosting36

But servage are 7.50 per month? (admitedly they give obscene amounts of oversold space and bandwidth )

Webmonkey

Still not that bad. Yeah obviously they are doing the oversold stuff too but I must say they are quite friendly.

Just to let people know, please what ever you do stay away from valuehost.co.uk. What a load of crap. They constantly getting DOS attacks and the support is a joke. It takes them 2 weeks to reply and their phone numbers don't work.

jmcc

tom-thebox wrote:

Jmcc did you have ball park figures a while back (2 or 3 years now) of the % of irish sites hosted outside the country?

I'd have to do the figures again to give a precise figure but I'd reckon that the Irish market has matured considerably in the last few years. The bulk of Irish sites would be Irish hosted now. There are some large hosters that host outside of Ireland but what you tend to find outside of Ireland now are people on shared hosting and the odd small webdev with a dedicated box. It is a mature market and the barriers to entry are a lot higher now. This means that anyone trying to get into the market will, rather stupidly, sell at or near cost in an attempt to buy marketshare.

Regards...jmcc

Rollo Tamasi

i have hosting with 1and1 in the UK, only went with them for price and overall their service is terrible. I have had a load of trouble with their accounts department (partially my fault as you offically need to be a UK resident to get an account but the way they went about their business was apauling)

i also have hosting with Blacknight, very happy with the service

jmcc

smeggle wrote:

I'm wondering if the current pricing you have is in direct responce to that new hosting company that came out at the beginning of the year and slashed the .ie domain price along with 999mb space/100gigs bw packages?

Smeggle, I've resisted the temptation, so far, to tell you that you don't have much of a clue about the business end (as opposed to the retail) of the Irish hosting business. H365 is the significant market player in the Irish market and has the biggest share of the market. If it wanted to it could obliterate some of these mickey mouse operations that think they are going to take the market by storm by offering more for less. All the significant players have to do is give away free hosting for a while and most of these small operations would be in trouble.

The reality of a mature market is that it is very hard to dislodge the significant players and any dislodgement is done by other significant players. Right now, Eircom.net and Esat.net are being hammered by the second generation hosters like Novara, Irish Domains and Blacknight. Novara has overtaken Esat recently and if it continues growing, it should overtake Eircom in the next six months (if Eircom's poor performance continues).

At the moment, the top 20% of hosters would have approximately 80% of the market. Anyone can start a pricewar but it is only the guys with the deep pockets that can end it. Being the cheapest is not a unique selling point because someone with more money can always come along and sell cheaper.

Regards...jmcc

tom-thebox

GoneShootin wrote:

I think you need to make the question more specific tom. We could all be hosted with Irish companies, but **** knows where they actually get their hosting space and bandwidth from.

The question was "What country do you host your website in?", I dont think I could be any more specific.

mneylon

tom-thebox wrote:

The question was "What country do you host your website in?", I dont think I could be any more specific.

Maybe not, as you understand what that means.

However a lot of people presume that because they are buying from an Irish operation that their site will be hosted in Ireland...

If you look at the list here:

http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/Country/IE

most people would probably assume that they all host in Ireland, whereas about a third of that list don't

Funky Munky

nikimere wrote:

doteasy.com - america
simply because you get UNLIMITED bandwidth and 20GB of space for €90 a year. and they have excellent support.

They sound too good to be true. Is anyone else with them?

steve-hosting36

You'll find lots on webhostingtalk.com about them, for example:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=383044&highlight=doteasy

GoneShootin

blacknight wrote:

most people would probably assume that they all host in Ireland, whereas about a third of that list don't

My point exactly. Plus Europe and America are not countries

tom-thebox

GoneShootin wrote:

My point exactly. Plus Europe and America are not countries

haha now that is a good point

mneylon

tom-thebox wrote:

haha now that is a good point

Sure I always knew your geography was dire

DOLEMAN

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Just out of interest (since..... dont try to advertise again) - what makes you think Irish prices are any worse than anywhere else in the world?

US prices are extremely cheaper. MANAGED high spec servers in the US cost about the same price as an unmanged Celeron in Ireland. If I remember correctly, H365 charge €200 per hour for work done on customers server, whereas the US host does it for free (on a managed server.)

Makes a big difference!

Also, the US hosts, even if they are unmanaged, are normally fairly customer friendly and will sort out server problems for their customers. Irish hosts do not seem to do this without getting some €€€... (i.e. €200 per hour.)

I also find the customer service from US hosts to be far superior (although I think in general customer service in the US is better than in Ireland.)

Saying all that... I'm happy with my Irish host (good uptime/network!)

steve-hosting36

Hi Doleman, It's actually €75 per hour, and only for skilled engineering time. General things like reinstalls, hands and eyes, reboots and basic help are all complimentary.

It's also important to compare like with like. Few US hosts can match 60 euro a month for a dedicated server and still give the same levels of connectivity and service / SLA.

thedesigntribe

I host with Hosting365.ie whose support has saved my sanity on numerous occasions - one notable time 2 years ago - when Stephen helped me out on the phone at 7pm on a Saturday evening.

Anyone who is serious about developing sites for their Irish clients that perform well in search engines, hosts in Ireland!

cgarvey

thedesigntribe wrote:

Anyone who is serious about developing sites for their Irish clients that perform well in search engines, hosts in Ireland!

While Irish support is very helpful (and I have sites & servers in Ireland), that sweeping statement doesn't cut it with me. Others have made points about SLAs, level of support, bandwidth & pricing, and shared hosting is as competitive here as anywhere else, but dedicated servers / co-lo is still a long way off (even with H365's €60 10Mbit).

Irish SEO can do just as well with a .ie or with something like Blacknights Astermdamn space (with Irish IP allocation). Bang for buck (uptime, SLA and bandwidth), Ireland still fairs badly with the States, in my opinion.

steve-hosting36

Cgarvey - can you give some examples?

I've seen few US operations that can compete with us these days... never mind still being a 'long way off'

dahamsta

The big boys are more expensive on dedi these days, but there's oodles of cheapies out there, you only have to poke your nose in the dedi offers forum on WHT to find them. That being said, Europe in general and Germany in particular are consistently cheaper that the US these days.

DOLEMAN

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Cgarvey - can you give some examples?

I've seen few US operations that can compete with us these days... never mind still being a 'long way off'

Loads of stuff here -

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36

I like this one -

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=512586

US prices are certainly cheaper overall (when you take into account managed/unmanaged, contracts, cPanel etc.)

Also, as I said in a previous post, the customer service from US hosts is far superior. I always feel they are thinking "the customer is always right" whereas Irish hosts are thinking "the customer is stupid, we're right"... (again, this is a problem with Ireland in general, not just hosting companies...)

If a website is important to me, I would host it in Ireland though. I like the fact that I can send the lads around if something goes wrong...

cgarvey

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Cgarvey - can you give some examples?

I've seen few US operations that can compete with us these days... never mind still being a 'long way off'

If you mean on price alone, I'm reasonably confident I could beat your lowest R365 price. That's not to say I would want to (because of the Irish support point I made earlier). But any serious dedicated server user needs lots of backup options. Remote boot for when system hangs (I read somewhere on R365 that that's included, but I've not got any details other than that), remote console (for kernel upgrades, troubleshooting), instant OS resinstall.. all features that come as standard on any $99 plan with the big boys. Sure, on price you guys are up there with the best, but feature / bang-for-buck you aren't. Hands'n'Eyes 40mins-1hour away isn't a substitute for the abovementioned.

So on price, you are competitive (which is why I'm a direct and indirect customer of yours), but I wouldn't host any mission critical site on R365 (lack of decent SLA, 10Mbit connection), and servers365 is way off the mark.

On price you can be beaten, but personally, I'd be very cagey of the various offers on WHT. I hope that clarifies what I mean, a bit.

BreadBoard

Does anyone here use http://www.webworld.ie/ ? or know anything about them?

I didn't see them being mentioned in this thread.