Researching hosting for an ecommerce website

StickyIcky

I'm building a self hosted ecommerce website.

I know about half our visitors/customers will be Irish and the other half from various European countries.

So for hosting I was considering going with a UK hosting provider. Because it's 'half way' in between Ireland and Europe and because there are many more UK hosts available to choose from.

Would there be any negative impacts caused by this decision anyone is aware of?

mneylon

A lot of the smaller UK providers are just resellers of other providers and wouldn't have their own hardware or networks etc., so the connection speeds might not be as good.

If you're choosing a hosting provider based on network speed etc., then you should make sure they run their own network.

jmcc

The obvious one is that your site would be in a different jurisdication and may have to adhere to both Irish and UK law. As Blacknight said above, most smaller hosters do not own their own equipment or networks so you could effectively be hosting the site on the reseller of a reseller of a reseller. Larger hosters do have their own hardware and network connectivity but some of them also have significant shares of datacentres. If you are going to target the two markets, then use a .ie for the Irish market and a .co.uk for the UK market. Having a .com or .other covering both country level IE/UK markets is not a good approach because it would make your site seem to be yet another .com site and therefore not as trustworthy as a .ie or .co.uk to the end user.

Regards...jmcc

StickyIcky

Thanks for the good points guys.

JMCC: The site is currently a .EU site. It's doing well the with Irish market and also the EU market. Visitor ratio is about 50/50 Irish and European, hence why I was considering server location somewhere in the middle. Right now I've been told the servers are located in the states. The site ranks fairly well speed wise on pingdom tools speed test engine. My main concern is the new site ranks on par or preferably higher than the current site. I'll be accomplishing this by using a fast well configured server and a well configured site with sprite images and compressed CSS and JS etc.

Blacknight: I actually use your Blacknight service for a hosting and domain names of a few .IE sites I've built for clients. I agree that using a .IE domain name for an Irish website and hosting in a good Irish hosting company is essential for Irish businesses.

Also good point about the company reselling or actually owning their hardware. The ones I'm interested in https://www.vidahost.com/ are definitely owners and reading their website they're very impressive. They have generator backups and fire suppression etc and provide tours of their server facilities if you like even. They have phone support from 9-11pm and ticket support after hours which is usually responded to within less than an hour or typically 15-20 minutes.


One last thing, would you have any tips when I'm migrating their site from one ecommerce platform to another to keep as much 'link juice' as possible? I was considering compiling a list of their top ranking pages and redirecting those links to the new links. If there's some easier or smarter way of doing this I'm not aware of please do let me know. Thank you again guys.

mneylon

Well I never said anything about .ie domains so I'm not sure where that came from

3sixty

I think your over complicating things.

If your already with blacknight why dont you stick with blacknight.

It does not matter where your hosting is based or who your targeting anymore with regards to hosting. you could have hosting with blacknight and target customers in japan if you wanted to.

Another hosting provider will be extra costs for you when it is not needed.

As you asked though- rackspace is a reputable hosting provider in the uk.

StickyIcky

No no you misunderstand me.

I have other .IE sites all hosted in Blacknight.

This .EU site in question is not a self hosting solution (i.e. it's not on blacknight or any other of my servers). It's a managed and hosted solution by the provider, I don't have hosting for it (think Shopify). I'm changing the site in question to self hosted very soon and was just wondering if hosting in a particularly country with have a noticeable impact on server speed.

I'm aware that you can host in ireland and serve to japan. My question was more about placement of the hosting server effecting speed or performance of the site or not.

Anyway I believe I've made up my mind about hosting, so thanks for your inputs.