How does an online store show up in irish searches

jessie_pinkman

i was gonna buy a domain and a host to set up a store for ireland but would i need to buy a domain from a company in ireland to get the website to show up in searches for ireland only?

Graham

No, but if you're targeting an Irish market I would recommend a .ie domain name and a web host with servers based in Ireland.

I don't think that makes as much difference as it used to but it certainly won't do you any harm.

sheesh

you would I think give it a location when submitting it to google if there is a physical location to a store you could put gps meta tag in the html header I'm not toos sure if that helps though.

basically tell the search engines what country you are in

jessie_pinkman

is there any advatage to using a ie because i will be using an irish server and .com is much cheaper to use

Graham

From an SEO perspective I don't thing the differences are huge any more But personally I'd still go for a .ie for anything targeting the irish market.

Cost wise, you're probably only looking at €13 in the difference.

jmcc

jessie_pinkman wrote: »

is there any advatage to using a ie because i will be using an irish server and .com is much cheaper to use

Use a .ie domain name. The .ie ccTLD is the main top level domain in Ireland now and while .com is still widely used, people seem to expect an Irish site to have a .ie domain name. Make it easy for your market and customers - people in Ireland don't have to remember that the .ie domain is their TLD so a .ie domain name/url is easier to remember.

Regards...jmcc

jessie_pinkman

jmcc wrote: »

Use a .ie domain name. The .ie ccTLD is the main top level domain in Ireland now and while .com is still widely used, people seem to expect an Irish site to have a .ie domain name. Make it easy for your market and customers - people in Ireland don't have to remember that the .ie domain is their TLD so a .ie domain name/url is easier to remember.

Regards...jmcc

i dont have a company/ shop and i heard its difficult to get an ie domain without that, id like to sell exclusively online and i want to set up the site very soon

Graham

Don't believe everything you hear. I've never had a problem getting a .ie.

Have a search through my previous posts for domain name, I've posted about it before.

jessie_pinkman

i setup an offline host and created a website offline before making one online, if i backup the website using this (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/) will i be able to restore it when i make an online website and will it be exactly the same as the backed up website?

Graham

You will be able to restore it but it's not a 'click a button' operation using the plugin you have.

Google 'move a wordpress site', there's about 2 million articles for you to pick from. You'll also come across plenty of plugins that will support backup/restore and/or moving a WordPress install.

jessie_pinkman

what hosting type would you recommend? do i need a business hosting with SSL certificates if i use paypal payments exclusively? And if i used a host in america would the site show up on irish searched?

Graham

If you're targeting an Irish market, why would you locate your website a few thousand miles away?

'Business hosting' doesn't mean anything other than 'we'll charge you more than for the plan called personal hosting'. It's purely a marketing term. If you're only planning single site for now go with a relatively low spec from one of the bigger name Irish hosts.

Your SSL requirements will depend on the shopping cart you're using and how your cart/you will handle payments. You should be able to get an SLL cert for less than €20 if you shop around (I paid less than a tenner last time).

We can't recommend any hosting providers on Boards but there is a list on the 2nd post here http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=114211

You don't have to buy your domain, hosting, ssl certs from the same supplier. You'll save money by shopping around BUT it's often easier to buy from a single supplier (usually your chosen web host) as they'll help you configure things like SSL, DNS etc. If you aren't comfortable with things like DNS and SSL certs you could add a few days to your setup time if you're trying to do it yourself but you will of course have the advantage of learning as you go.

devildriver

If yuo are targetting the Irish market then having a dot ie address will have a real effect on search engine performance.

The location of the server is almost irrelevant at this point from an SEO perspective. As long as the hosting server is fast then there are no penalties for using one outside of your target country.

Graham

devildriver wrote: »

The location of the server is almost irrelevant at this point from an SEO perspective. As long as the hosting server is fast then there are no penalties for using one outside of your target country.

If you're target customers are in Ireland, why would you consider hosting thousands of miles away, potentially increasing latency between your web server and your customer.

If you're looking for specialist hosting or dedicated servers the cost benefits may make it worthwhile but for bog standard shared hosting I really don't see the point.

devildriver

Graham wrote: »

If you're target customers are in Ireland, why would you consider hosting thousands of miles away, potentially increasing latency between your web server and your customer.

If you're looking for specialist hosting or dedicated servers the cost benefits may make it worthwhile but for bog standard shared hosting I really don't see the point.

There's more choice and competition outside of the Irish market. There are very few hosting providers in this country that I would rate in terms of price and customer service - that's my experience, YMMV.

Using a good hosting company elsewhere can provide repsonse times as fast if not faster than entry level local hosting packages. London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are major traffic hubs in Europe. Quality servers located in those cities will give low latency.

Graham

devildriver wrote: »

There's more choice and competition outside of the Irish market. There are very few hosting providers in this country that I would rate in terms of price and customer service - that's my experience, YMMV.

Using a good hosting company elsewhere can provide repsonse times as fast if not faster than entry level local hosting packages. London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are major traffic hubs in Europe. Quality servers located in those cities will give low latency.

For a shared hosting package what are we talking about in price difference? Not more than a few €€ unless you're going for the serious budget hosting (I wouldn't).

International connectivity has improved massively over recent years but I'd still try and get my web server as close as possible to the bulk of my customers unless there's a significant reason not to. I'd even apply the same principle when it comes to choosing cloud hosting, AWS West means cloud services are based in Ireland.

I recently met someone who spent the guts of €1000 on site optimisation. He couldn't understand why 40,000 items in a WordPress e-commerce solution would cause his site to crawl. This was after he had already spent €200 to get an off-shore freelancer to install a WordPress cache plugin.

It hadn't occurred to him for a second that his 'unlimited' shared 'Business Gold' hosting plan costing £4 a month might have been an issue.

devildriver

Graham wrote: »

For a shared hosting package what are we talking about in price difference? Not more than a few €€ unless you're going for the serious budget hosting (I wouldn't).

Yes I suppose we're not comparing like with like. I'm using a relatively expensive VPS in Chicago, on which I host all my client's sites. On top of that I use Cloudflare and MaxCDN. For shared hosting I would probably look to the UK or possibly Ireland. With shared hosting though most providers will proabably oversell the servers anyway leading to performance issues no matter whay country they are in.

Graham wrote: »

International connectivity has improved massively over recent years but I'd still try and get my web server as close as possible to the bulk of my customers unless there's a significant reason not to. I'd even apply the same principle when it comes to choosing cloud hosting, AWS West means cloud services are based in Ireland.

It all depends on features / speed versus price. If using something resource hiungry like Magento I'd sooner go for a faster server further away than a slower one closer!

Graham wrote: »

I recently met someone who spent the guts of €1000 on site optimisation. He couldn't understand why 40,000 items in a WordPress e-commerce solution would cause his site to crawl. This was after he had already spent €200 to get an off-shore freelancer to install a WordPress cache plugin.

It hadn't occurred to him for a second that his 'unlimited' shared 'Business Gold' hosting plan costing £4 a month might have been an issue.

!!! Don't get me started...!!!:rolleyes:

Graham

For VPS, that's one of the 'significant reasons' I alluded to in my last post. I too host those outside of Ireland, the cost benefits were just too much to ignore and my chosen provider has an API which lets me provision new VM's from my own custom back-end software as required.

+1 for Cloudflare too.

The mainstream Irish shared hosting providers I've come across haven't oversold but then again I do avoid the back-bedroom single VPS hosts and have been around the market long-enough to know which ones to avoid.

M.T.D

We seem to have gone from appearing in searches in Ireland to Hosting.

We use US hosting for sites with US market and had used hosting here in Ireland for Irish and UK sites. So I read this thread with interest.
Making changes on US servers from here does appear to have problems with lag. I became fed up with local hosting as out side of office hours the only support was via ticket and often other than acknowledgement nothing happened till the following morning. There are a couple of companies I have used here that have solid hosting but there control panels suck still showing expired domains from years ago.
If you had a problem on Friday evening of a bankholiday you may as well turn off the ads an go to the pub.
We have now moved many of our sites to a US company that has servers in UK. Live chat even on Xmas day, they even migrated many sites on the 26th Dec. So far no problems and 24 hour a day service.

Graham

M.T.D wrote: »

If you had a problem on Friday evening of a bankholiday you may as well turn off the ads an go to the pub.

That's not the experience I've ever had with the Irish host I use. Out of hours, log a trouble ticket and the response has always been appropriate to the severity of the issue.

The issue with many of the larger international hosts, who do offer 24/7 on line chat support is the skill level of the support technician. If they've got teams of support people around the clock you can be fairly certain it's a relatively low level 'tech support' bod who's reading from a flowchart. That might be useful if you need to ask what a DNS record is but if it's anything anyway more complicated, they'll log a ticket and escalate it to L2/L3 support who might be paged if it's appropriate to the severity of the issue.

The net result is the same level of support unless you need hand-holding through the things the support flow-charts cover.

Remember we're talking about shared hosting here not dedicated managed servers with defined OOO coverage and SLA's.

KonFusion

Can't help but post:

Graham

* note to self: insert SHIBBOLEET routing next time playing with Twilio *

jessie_pinkman

fellas is there any backup program that works like hostgator.com backup but which can be done for free, i want to backup the whole site and use it under a different domain and web host
Also i will have few items for sale (less than 100) so the web host country wouldnt make much of a difference

devildriver

jessie_pinkman wrote: »

fellas is there any backup program that works like hostgator.com backup but which can be done for free, i want to backup the whole site and use it under a different domain and web host
Also i will have few items for sale (less than 100) so the web host country wouldnt make much of a difference

I don't know about Hostgator but if you are using a WHM/ CPanel based setup you can do a cpMove from one server to another. If both servers are running cPanel it can be done directly "over the air" sometimes it can be faster to just download the cpMove file to your PC and upload it to the new host. And it is free.

M.T.D

jessie_pinkman wrote: »

fellas is there any backup program that works like hostgator.com backup but which can be done for free, i want to backup the whole site and use it under a different domain and web host
Also i will have few items for sale (less than 100) so the web host country wouldnt make much of a difference

We have just moved several sites from hostgator.
If your new host uses cPanel they may move the site for you.
In the Cpanel on hostgator there is an option to backup the whole panel including all databases email accounts etc. Very few hosts permit you to restore a cpanel from one of these backups but if you upload it to your new account they will then expand it for you, if they won't pick a different host. All you have to do then is change the nameserver. Depending on your internet speed the whole thing can be done in less time than the nameserver takes to propagate.

jessie_pinkman

M.T.D wrote: »

We have just moved several sites from hostgator.
If your new host uses cPanel they may move the site for you.
In the Cpanel on hostgator there is an option to backup the whole panel including all databases email accounts etc. Very few hosts permit you to restore a cpanel from one of these backups but if you upload it to your new account they will then expand it for you, if they won't pick a different host. All you have to do then is change the nameserver. Depending on your internet speed the whole thing can be done in less time than the nameserver takes to propagate.

and lets say i made an account with hostgator and backed up the website but then made one with blacknight would i be able to restore the backup to blacknight?

M.T.D

As far as I am aware the back up and restore function for cpanel accounts only works going from one cpanel to another cpanel account.
Blacknight as far as I know do not use cpanel. So you would need to pack your site and down load the databases. If you are using wordpress there are scripts and plugins that will backup your entire site including database. You can then redeploy this on Blacknight. Not all backups work equally and some move the data but break image links. The emails are a separate issue.

jessie_pinkman

M.T.D wrote: »

As far as I am aware the back up and restore function for cpanel accounts only works going from one cpanel to another cpanel account.
Blacknight as far as I know do not use cpanel. So you would need to pack your site and down load the databases. If you are using wordpress there are scripts and plugins that will backup your entire site including database. You can then redeploy this on Blacknight. Not all backups work equally and some move the data but break image links. The emails are a separate issue.

and if i was just starting out as a sole trader what would i put up as my company information to look safe and legit?

M.T.D

You need your company registration number.
What else is up to you.
Would you buy online from a website with only a mobile phone and an email address.
Trading address and landline number make a big difference even though neither really mean a lot as you can rent a landline number that rings on your mobile and an office addresses for your post for less than €25/month for both.

What can make a big difference is a history and likes/plusses on FaceBook and Google+ business pages

jessie_pinkman

M.T.D wrote: »

You need your company registration number.
What else is up to you.
Would you buy online from a website with only a mobile phone and an email address.
Trading address and landline number make a big difference even though neither really mean a lot as you can rent a landline number that rings on your mobile and an office addresses for your post for less than €25/month for both.

What can make a big difference is a history and likes/plusses on FaceBook and Google+ business pages

yes social networks are playing a big part in popularity currently . I plan to sell online to both UK and Ireland and as you said people feel more secure with phone numbers but how would the people in UK be able to call without having to pay a premium?

M.T.D

There are several companies that you can rent a phone package from that include Irish and UK landline numbers and calls to and from the UK for around €20 a month

jessie_pinkman

what are the ecommcerce regulations?