Whats this I hear about Enda justifying having the Fine Geil site made in Florida?

Duncan1001011

I heard this was on the news the other day. Enda Kenny was saying that Ireland doesn't have enough technology for the production of the Fine Geil site.
How does this make the technology sector look on the global scale of things if a governmental intuition would out source to Florida??


Or am I just mad and picking up on bad meemes?

grizzly

I can't believe that the site is still down. Why don't they revert to the version that was up before the video?

This article explains the poor situtation;

http://www.thejournal.ie/smart-economy-fine-gaels-news-website-is-housed-in-miami-2011-01/

Sparks

Nothing to do with Software Development, moving to Politics and the tender mercies of the Politics Mods...

Sulmac

Interestingly, Fine Gael is the only major party whose regular website is hosted in Ireland. The other parties have their sites based in the US or UK. Source.

whatstherush

The site wasn't "made" in Florida, it was just hosted there.

Dirk Gently

He looked like a rabbit caught in headlights when Dobson brought it up the other day. Hard to think he wouldn't have been prepared for the question.

Seloth

I don't see its problem.Its just cheaper to do so.

ei.sdraob

Seloth wrote: »

I don't see its problem.Its just cheaper to do so.

Our government policies (energy & networks) have made hosting much more expensive here than it could be costing this country plenty of jobs, when compared to US and continent.

Of course our bellowed FF host their site in Texas...

The real question to be asking here is why Irish companies can not compete in the datacenter/hosting space who need cheap & quality bandwidth, cheap energy and good technicians/engineers. Ive been banging on about this for donkeys.

As for FG site being hacked, a possible motive is them supporting ACTA at EU level. Which is a big mistake for FG imho :mad:

Duncan1001011

I have no problem if it was the cheaper option for hosting. If Irish companies are loosing out on these sort of opportunities to places with more competitive prices, then so be it.

I was just hearing that Enda was pointing to the state of the technology sector as a reason for having it developed in the US. Never mind so.

Riddle101

Well I kind've do have a problem with it. Even if it's cheaper. As an Irish political party they should be showing full support to the Irish. By going abroad, they're kind've saying, Ireland isn't good enough which makes Ireland look bad.

Manach

From the source that Sulmac posted, only the Socialist type parties are hosting in Ireland, to their credit. The IT sector in Ireland is responsible for a high percentage of exports/jobs in this country, so saying that a party was "not interested" about where they host their window to the nation, seems a tad retrograde.

ei.sdraob

Riddle101 wrote: »

Well I kind've do have a problem with it. Even if it's cheaper. As an Irish political party they should be showing full support to the Irish. By going abroad, they're kind've saying, Ireland isn't good enough which makes Ireland look bad.

But hosting services in Ireland are rubbish thanks to politicians

goat2

Sulmac wrote: »

Interestingly, Fine Gael is the only major party whose regular website is hosted in Ireland. The other parties have their sites based in the US or UK. Source.

that is something, they spend our money elsewhere, where are they having them designed and why are they going outside our country to host them, here are points against them, noo vootes

patwicklow

They tell us to buy irish.....my ass FG wont get my vote either same crap.

PCPhoto

ei.sdraob wrote: »

But hosting services in Ireland are rubbish thanks to politicians

hosting services are also rubbish due to lack of broadband and infrastructure and hosting companies charging more ...oh wait ... that all comes back to politicians and policies.

ei.sdraob

PCPhoto wrote: »

hosting services are also rubbish due to lack of broadband and infrastructure and hosting companies charging more ...oh wait ... that all comes back to politicians and policies.

you just posted exactly the same point i made (twice) in this thread

goat2

where are the labour and greens getting their hostings from, and this next election are they going north again to get posters printed, while there are enough small printing businesses in south who could do with the earnings

Dannyboy83

I know they use an Irish company for some of their technology services anyway, given that I work in one.

ei.sdraob

goat2 wrote: »

where are the labour and greens getting their hostings from, and this next election are they going north again to get posters printed, while there are enough small printing businesses in south who could do with the earnings

* labour @ netherlands

* greens @ norway

* sinnfein @ us



For the third time I dont blame any Irish businesses for choosing to host their sites/services abroad, Ireland is simply to highly uncompetitive in this area due to failed policies of FF and Greens, which is a shame.

Ive been going on about this for years on this site, both of the above are killing an industry which could bring jobs and profits here.

My own company has/had servers and hardware in US, NL, DE, FR, Sweden and of all places Lithuania now, yes I get better/cheaper service and lower pings to rest of europe in an eastern european country than Ireland :rolleyes:

This site here boards.ie could save Boards Ltd mucho €€€ by shifting servers outside of Ireland , If @DeVore is worried about trying to keep an Irish ip (for SEO reasons) or try to keep appearance of supporting Rip Off Ireland :rolleyes: then I can help you setup a haproxy instance to reverse proxy to cheaper/faster hardware you can get 5ms away in France for example, if anything such a move would make the site load much faster, but then again this site is running on vbulletin which is a beast to try to make more efficient

edit: I just ran this page thru firebug, It took an incredible 2.8s to load with no cache! ~ 245KB with 35 requests!!! tho it seems the technical team here are aware of the monstrosity and at least put most of the files onto the static domain

BlaasForRafa

patwicklow wrote: »

They tell us to buy irish.....my ass FG wont get my vote either same crap.

So you'd prefer the party intentionally wasted money? You didn't happen to vote FF last time did you?

Seth Brundle

Seloth wrote: »

I don't see its problem.Its just cheaper to do so.

You don't see an irony in FG's call to boost jobs, etc. here whilst outsourcing services to a non EU country that could have been done here?

Still, they used foreign services to both inspire and develop the finegael.ie site (not the new finegael2011.com site)
http://www.iamsteph.com/web/2009/fine-gael-rips-off-bbc-website
The advert looking for someone to develop the site and it made reference to the BBC site IIRC and IIRC someone from Russia was hired to do the work - now removed from http://www.freelancer.com/projects/PHP-XML/Web-portal-Ajax-PHP-mySql.html


(but they obviously denied everything -http://www.tribune.ie/news/home-news/article/2009/apr/19/fine-gael-denies-allegation-of-plagiarising-bbc-ne/)

goat2

ei.sdraob wrote: »

* labour @ netherlands

* greens @ norway

* sinnfein @ us



For the third time I dont blame any Irish businesses for choosing to host their sites/services abroad, Ireland is simply to highly uncompetitive in this area due to failed policies of FF and Greens, which is a shame.

Ive been going on about this for years on this site, both of the above are killing an industry which could bring jobs and profits here.

My own company has/had servers and hardware in US, NL, DE, FR, Sweden and of all places Lithuania now, yes I get better/cheaper service and lower pings to rest of europe in an eastern european country than Ireland :rolleyes:

This site here boards.ie could save Boards Ltd mucho €€€ by shifting servers outside of Ireland , If @DeVore is worried about trying to keep an Irish ip (for SEO reasons) or try to keep appearance of supporting Rip Off Ireland :rolleyes: then I can help you setup a haproxy instance to reverse proxy to cheaper/faster hardware you can get 5ms away in France for example, if anything such a move would make the site load much faster, but then again this site is running on vbulletin which is a beast to try to make more efficient

edit: I just ran this page thru firebug, It took an incredible 2.8s to load with no cache! ~ 245KB with 35 requests!!! tho it seems the technical team here are aware of the monstrosity and at least put most of the files onto the static domain

that is my vote gone from all of the above
the greens were never going to get my vote anyway

Ihavehadenough

Corruption and Lies from All Sides

http://whois.domaintools.com/finegael2011.com

Florida != Arizona


They haven't quite covered their tracks

The hosting company is called electionmall.com and they charge $19.95 to register a dot com for a year:-> blacknight are 5.99 euro for the same

gandalf

If you know anything about registering sites and hosting domains then you would realise that the cost to register a site is a very slight fraction compared to the cost of hosting one especially one with high volume of traffic like a political party election site.

groggles11

ei.sdraob wrote: »

you just posted exactly the same point i made (twice) in this thread

That's well and truly besides the point to be fair. Its just a bit rich that FG (who have the best chance of gaining power in their lives) are pontificating about growing Irish economy and creating jobs yet they outsource the hosting of their own website. It doesn't matter if its more expensive or if the infrastructure isn't as good as Florida's, its the point that an opposition party to a Government hated by the majority of its population seem to be following the same mistakes as FF. The decision has little to do with the pragmatic but more with the gesture!

gandalf

groggles I agree with you. It is unfortunate that FG are hosting their site outside the state. For clarity and transparency I think they should publish the quotes they obtained from Irish suppliers and from overseas suppliers as well (if they did indeed get quotes). I have a feeling that it would become quite clear why they have had to consider hosting the site outside Ireland and given that all the other main parties are doing the same it shows that our costs are too high for this type of service.

goose2005

Duncan1001011 wrote: »

I heard this was on the news the other day. Enda Kenny was saying that Ireland doesn't have enough technology for the production of the Fine Geil site.
How does this make the technology sector look on the global scale of things if a governmental intuition would out source to Florida??


Or am I just mad and picking up on bad meemes?

FG are not a government institution. And "Buy Irish" is BS. If Irish businesses can't produce quality goods for cheaper I'll buy elsewhere. Americans told each other "Buy an American car," and so they got overtaken because there was less incentive to produce a good car.

jmcc

It now seems to be hosted in the UK on one of Rackspace's UK IP ranges.

It is a disgrace that FG, and other Irish political parties host their sites outside of Ireland. The reason for FG hosting outside of Ireland is probably due to the consultancy used than any clueful strategy by FG.

Politicians tend to be, as a rule, utterly clueless about the web and the often believe the guff in the Irish Times technology section. From some of the posts I've read about the Irish hosting industry, so do some posters. Running a few brochureware sites on shared hosting is not the same as running a large scale database backed website that needs constant care and attention.

The FG site was originally on a Rackspace IP associated with an address in Florida. The particular IP had approximately 119 sites hosted on it. The new one appears to only have the FG site hosted.

FG's web strategy has been a master class in incompetence. Hosting in Ireland would have made far more sense because some of the larger Irish hosters are connected to the INEX, the Irish Internet Exchange. This means that traffic from Irish sites tends to get passed directly to Irish ISPs rather than all around the web. It can result in faster access times and speeds.

The other mistake is FG's use of a .com rather than a .ie domain. The websites mentioned in most Irish advertising now use .ie domains. Perhaps it was the "experts" in the American consultancy who decided on the .com as the primary brand. But then .com is the de-facto American country code domain. It is not that of Ireland. In the EU, the country code domains (.ie, .uk, .de etc) are far stronger brands than .com and in the UK and Germany, there are more ccTLD domains registered by people in those countries than .com domains. Ironically, FG owns the finegael2011.ie domain.

There also seems to be a confusion over broadband/access and the Irish hosting infrastructure. They are two separate though related issues. Some of the large Irish hosters are very well set up as regards bandwidth and equipment. However bandwidth and access are still problems for many in Ireland. The large Irish hosters would easily be capable of hosting a small site like FG's finegael2011.com.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

gandalf wrote: »

I have a feeling that it would become quite clear why they have had to consider hosting the site outside Ireland and given that all the other main parties are doing the same it shows that our costs are too high for this type of service.

It is often down to the choice of the web developer than the party. In the case of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, it may have been down to the consultancy providing the service package. I would estimate that about 80% of Irish websites are now hosted on Irish hosters but there are still Irish sites hosted elsewhere. Some of this is down to monetary concerns (cheap US hosting etc) or SEO concerns (targeting different countries) but from looking at some of the website clusters, it is often down to the web developers having started out on non-Irish hosters when Irish hosting costs were far higher than they are today. As these web developers grew, so did the number of sites they hosted on their servers. Some eventually move their clients back to Irish hosting space but there are many one man multinationals out there.

Regards...jmcc

ei.sdraob

groggles11 wrote: »

That's well and truly besides the point to be fair. Its just a bit rich that FG (who have the best chance of gaining power in their lives) are pontificating about growing Irish economy and creating jobs yet they outsource the hosting of their own website. It doesn't matter if its more expensive or if the infrastructure isn't as good as Florida's, its the point that an opposition party to a Government hated by the majority of its population seem to be following the same mistakes as FF. The decision has little to do with the pragmatic but more with the gesture!

Every single major Irish party has their site hosted outside of Ireland.
As I illustrated in this thread already, with the only exception of SWP who are with hosting365, even the communists have their site in UK

While it probably wont cost them all much to move back to Ireland since these sites are small, neither would moving all of them here create a single job
via hosting, tho there might have been some contract work during the construction/design of them

@jmcc
For large-scale consumers of quality and cheap bandwidth like my company we have to abroad, the costs are about 10x here in Ireland for multigigabit commits. At this point of time one of our projects is using more than the going thru the INEX in Dublin just to give you and idea. Same commit in Ireland would literary put us out of business as the costs are an order of magnitude larger.


Seems alot of people are so busy wrapping themselves in the "buy Irish" flag they are forgetting to ask the important questions, why is this the case? what policies have led to Ireland becoming uncompetitive?

jmcc

ei.sdraob wrote: »

While it probably wont cost them all much to move back to Ireland since these sites are small, neither would moving all of them here create a single job
via hosting, tho there might have been some contract work during the construction/design of them

That's the case for most websites - they are small and tend to use minimal resources. Hosting is very much a volume based business so hosting jobs being created by moving one brochureware site is not really a valid argument. It is the principle of an Irish political party using Irish hosters and services that matters. And in politics, perception can matter more than reality. Fine Gael has allowed itself to be perceived as being no different to Fianna Fail in that it doesn't use Irish services. That, more than the data privacy issue, is the most damaging thing for FG as it could easily be spun by opponents.

For large-scale consumers of quality and cheap bandwidth like my company we have to abroad, the costs are about 10x here in Ireland for multigigabit commits.

Yes but operations like that are more the exception than the rule. Once you get away from the very large sites the numbers of pages on sites tends to drop away very quickly. The original Fine Gael 2011 site when it was hosted in Florida appeared to be on a shared hosting IP. The site is not quite on the same level of traffic as Youtube or Facebook.

Seems alot of people are so busy wrapping themselves in the "buy Irish" flag they are forgetting to ask the important questions, why is this the case? what policies have led to Ireland becoming uncompetitive?

Ireland's hosting business is probably about five to eight years behind that of some of the larger countries in Europe. It was, initially, dominated by the ISPs (Eircom/ESAT) but they lost out to what were the second generation of Hosting Service Providers (HSPs). The ISPs also had the high-end side of the market to themselves but again the HSPs began to take some of this area of the market from them. In terms of retail hosting (the shared hosting packages), the Irish hosting business has come a long way. But it was the stupid decision to privatise Telecom Eireann and allow it to be plundered by a bunch of vultures that did a lot of damage. The history of the Irish internet business would take a long time to explain.

Regards...jmcc

Jennyrose

jmcc wrote: »

Ireland's hosting business is probably about five to eight years behind that of some of the larger countries in Europe.

As demonstrated by Microsoft who have their cloud datacenter in Dublin which hosts some of the biggest websites in North Europe

jmcc

Jennyrose wrote: »

As demonstrated by Microsoft who have their cloud datacenter in Dublin which hosts some of the biggest websites in North Europe

The Irish hosting business (rather than international companies with their Irish operations) is behind most of the larger European countries because of broadband/access issue. Microsoft hosting their cloud data centre in Dublin is an irrelevance to the Irish hosting business. You could just as easily have pointed out that Amazon's European operation is largely on Irish IP space. But the reality is that the hundreds of thousands of Irish domains and websites are hosted on Irish hosters (the number of active websites is smaller than the total number of websites). The larger European countries are ccTLD positive. That means that they have more of their local ccTLDs registered by registrants in those countries than .com or gTLD domains. Ireland is moving towards being ccTLD positive with .ie domain registrations overtaking the gTLD registrations. The majority of Irish websites are small, brochureware sites but this is changing. Broadband access is a critical element in driving the demand for more developed and more complex websites. A lot of this development should have taken place over 2003 to 2006. However poor broadband connectivity slowed down the development of the Irish web space.

Regards...jmcc

Sparks

The point shouldn't be where's cheaper or where has better service; this is an Irish political party we're talking about. They should be using an Irish hosting service for their website for the same reason that companies should eat their own dogfood.

goat2

Duncan1001011 wrote: »

I heard this was on the news the other day. Enda Kenny was saying that Ireland doesn't have enough technology for the production of the Fine Geil site.
How does this make the technology sector look on the global scale of things if a governmental intuition would out source to Florida??


Or am I just mad and picking up on bad meemes?

and what is enda doing about it, why does he not help in developing this technology, and that is bull**** anyway that he uses this as an excuse to go outside the country to spend our money, instead of seeing to it that it can be done within the country, and in so doing, creating jobs for those of us who want to work, but because of the likes of him giving the jobs to outsiders to do, he is doing us out of work and money

Jennyrose

Typically, we are getting side-tracked, off-message if you like.

Do you honestly think Fine Gael are sitting around debating the pros and cons of hosting here, there or anywhere. THEY DON'T CARE.

They just want to get into power and power at any cost.

If there was any sincerity or even plain cop, they would opt for a 100% Irish service and proclaim it from the roof-tops. It is akin to a Minister for Health promoting healthy lifestyle and losing weight. It's the message..

FYI Fianna Fail use Obama's Blue State Digital - no reply to a query from us.

The Green Party use an open source which is admirable (and brave to be honest)

Sinn Fein - in house

Labour -Digital Revolutionaries based in Parliament Street in Temple Bar.

Make your own mind up on whether you think a political party will ever put the common man to the fore.

goat2

good to see labour doing this,
enda should not be going on about helping the people of this country if this is the high road he takes,

ei.sdraob

Jennyrose wrote: »

As demonstrated by Microsoft who have their cloud datacenter in Dublin which hosts some of the biggest websites in North Europe

A great way to launder more money thru Ireland for them, and claim back expenses via corpo tax

goat2 wrote: »

good to see labour doing this,
enda should not be going on about helping the people of this country if this is the high road he takes,

as shown earlier all major parties (yes that includes labour) are hosted outside ireland

jmcc

Jennyrose wrote: »

Do you honestly think Fine Gael are sitting around debating the pros and cons of hosting here, there or anywhere. THEY DON'T CARE.

It is worse than that: they don't know. As I pointed out earlier, the decision over where to host is often the choice of the web developer rather than the client. And in the case of Fine Gael, they have used a US consultancy to provide something similar to Fianna Fail's operation though without the sophistication and knowledge of the market. The use of .com instead of .ie is quite amateurish in my opinion considering how advertising in the the Irish market now focuses on .ie domains and websites. the most easily recognised domains in Ireland now are .ie, .com and .co.uk.

FYI Fianna Fail use Obama's Blue State Digital - no reply to a query from us.

Who is "us"? I take it that you are in the media rather than the industry?

The Green Party use an open source which is admirable (and brave to be honest)

Why is it brave? Most of the web runs on Open Source.

Regards...jmcc

Ardent

Jesus wept, I've seen it all now. The country is banjaxed - hundreds of thousands on the dole, our economic sovereignty forsaken as we struggle with national bankruptcy, an incompetent shower of lying chancers in government - and we're going to decide who we vote for based on where a poxy website is hosted?!!

Jennyrose

jmcc wrote: »

It is worse than that: they don't know. As I pointed out earlier, the decision over where to host is often the choice of the web developer rather than the client. And in the case of Fine Gael, they have used a US consultancy to provide something similar to Fianna Fail's operation though without the sophistication and knowledge of the market. The use of .com instead of .ie is quite amateurish in my opinion considering how advertising in the the Irish market now focuses on .ie domains and websites. the most easily recognised domains in Ireland now are .ie, .com and .co.uk.

Who is "us"? I take it that you are in the media rather than the industry?

Why is it brave? Most of the web runs on Open Source.

Regards...jmcc

JMCC

I think we are, in a roundabout way, saying the same thing. Care/know, what matter. It is the sheer lack of foresight, vision whatever you may call it. And these parties think by engaging a US company for spin/design/web hosting, they are buying into that type of campaign.

Trouble is the Irish were never into that type of campaign. We find it obvious, loud, vulgar even. To see Obama deliver his speech on Congresswoman Giffords "opening her eyes" as he passed by her hospital bed. Urgh, spare us - he can't honestly talk like that in reality. I digress. Back to Enda and the lads.

Yes, you are right- they don't even have the nous to know what the sincere thing to do is, they are so desperate to get into the corridors of power whereby they will dazzle us with their torpor.

"Us"- I mean nothing sinister other than me and my partner, voters both, who have no vested interest in any political party. I was involved in Construction (god love me- I certainly never partied, just worked and worked and worked and now won't ever get paid) and he, thankfully isn't.

"Brave" in that truly, the bravery comes from the fact that they are using a cheap and practical solution to put forth their message (I wonder if they contributed to the open source crowd) even thouugh the site DOES look a bit crap to the untrained eye, s'all.

And regards the final comment relating to the point of all this, Corbusier once said, "God is in the detail".

Message folks. It's all about message.

PS I would have normally considered myself closest to Labour if anyone's asking but I find them as power-hungry as the rest.

Jennyrose

It's not the same situation but just to let people know that Mary Harney's Ministry of Health tendered out the cervical smear service and awarded it to an American Company.

Previously to this, the State's smears were carried out by the Cytology Department in the Rotunda.

This department was sacked in it's entirety and the contract went to the US.

Anyone can PM me about what has happened Laboratory-wise in the States- a tender that is so "competitive" is bound to be good, right?

For now, please note that that what was an Irish Service, devised and operated by Irish People for Irish Citizens is no longer here in our Republic.

goat2

Jennyrose wrote: »

It's not the same situation but just to let people know that Mary Harney's Ministry of Health tendered out the cervical smear service and awarded it to an American Company.

Previously to this, the State's smears were carried out by the Cytology Department in the Rotunda.

This department was sacked in it's entirety and the contract went to the US.

Anyone can PM me about what has happened Laboratory-wise in the States- a tender that is so "competitive" is bound to be good, right?

For now, please note that that what was an Irish Service, devised and operated by Irish People for Irish Citizens is no longer here in our Republic.

more revenue gone from the country, what is wrong with them, we have brilliantly educated people here in this country to carry out these tests all they need is the laboratory, i do not trust testing outside the country, and it is not bound to be better outside the state to carry out these tests, has the american company made mistakes in the past with these tests, and getting a cheaper quote does not mean a safer system, that is if it were a cheaper quote, or was there some other reason for it

Jennyrose

goat2 wrote: »

more revenue gone from the country, what is wrong with them, we have brilliantly educated people here in this country to carry out these tests all they need is the laboratory, i do not trust testing outside the country, and it is not bound to be better outside the state to carry out these tests, has the american company made mistakes in the past with these tests, and getting a cheaper quote does not mean a safer system, that is if it were a cheaper quote, or was there some other reason for it

All I can say is YES to all your points here.
Imagine how good a service is that is STILL cheaper to send continuous test samples off on a plane to a lab in Boston than to give it to qualified Irish workers in Dubiln 1, who have been carrying this work out for years. This WILL be a scandal to match the anti-D and hep C cases, without doubt. As I alluded to in my original post, I have a trusted opinion on what happened on the Boston end of things, the first series of batches in particular..

Harney will be long gone at that stage- she probably wouldn't avail of this "public" service anyway. There may be changes in political accountability by then. Here's hoping.

Dionysus

Ardent wrote: »

Jesus wept, I've seen it all now. The country is banjaxed - hundreds of thousands on the dole, our economic sovereignty forsaken as we struggle with national bankruptcy, an incompetent shower of lying chancers in government - and we're going to decide who we vote for based on where a poxy website is hosted?!!

Sorry about that. Please provide us with a list of all the factors we should legitimately consider when voting and the factors we shouldn't. We'll endeavour to follow your preferences and concerns precisely because whatever things you consider important are clearly the only things which are important in this election.

Liam Byrne

Jennyrose wrote: »

As demonstrated by Microsoft who have their cloud datacenter in Dublin which hosts some of the biggest websites in North Europe

But what if you don't want to use closed-shop proprietary technologies ?

Jennyrose

Dionysus wrote: »

Sorry about that. Please provide us with a list of all the factors we should legitimately consider when voting and the factors we shouldn't. We'll endeavour to follow your preferences and concerns precisely because whatever things you consider important are clearly the only things which are important in this election.

Couldn't have said that better