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

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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