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 )