hosting question - already read sticky

kieran75

Hi,

I know questions re: hosting providers are not allowed here.

My question is - does anyone know of a good website that reviews Irish hosters. I have seen some good international sites that allow users to comment but nothing that I can see for Irish hosters. I found only one but it has very little reviews on it.

I am trying to make a descision based on what others have experienced.

Any links much appreciated.

steve-hosting36

The short answer is that there aren't any.

You'll find 'balanced' opinion on somewhere like www.creativeireland.com if you want to hear from other designers, otherwise, you'll need to find another forum to ask, or better yet, as the hosting providers you are evaluating for references / referees, or pop in to meet them.

jmcc

kieran75 wrote: »

My question is - does anyone know of a good website that reviews Irish hosters. I have seen some good international sites that allow users to comment but nothing that I can see for Irish hosters. I found only one but it has very little reviews on it.

The Irish hosting industry is a relatively mature one and the bulk of the business is shared amongst the top five hosters: Register365, Blacknight, Digiweb, Letshost, Irishdomains. These are effectively the super-hosters and together they grow by thousands of registrations per month. (A few individually have a growth rate of over 1000 domains per month.)

Then there are the ISPs and smaller hosters. Apart from Digiweb, the ISPs are largely trading on renewals from their past registrations. About seven years ago, Esat and Eircom dominated the Irish hosting market but through a mix of poor management and a failure to adapt to new market conditions led to the second generation hosters (Hosting365, Blacknight, Novara) overtaking them. Eircom has been trying to get back in the game but Esat has a history of continual failure and now seems to be concentrating on its high value dedicated hosting. An outsourcing play (bthosting.ie) a few years ago has failed to get any significant business.

The pseudo-hosters are really web developers who provide hosting for their clients. These hosters seem to reach a glass ceiling around 1000 hosted domains where they have to make a decision on whether to become a pure-play hoster or remain a web developer/hoster.

If you need to know the immediate stats for an hoster, just enter the domain name for their nameserver on www.hosterstats.com and it will show you the stats as of the first of the month eg:
http://www.hosterstats.com/historicaldns.php?domain=eircom.net

I will probably get around to posting a top Irish hosters list in the next few days.

I am trying to make a descision based on what others have experienced.

When it goes beyond simple domain name hosting, reviews tend to be highly subjective. The other problem is that many people don't have a wide experience of hosting on which to base the review so the "review" generally turns into a rant against some perceived wrong and a paen to their latest hoster. Then there are the Astroturf reviews of hosters by themselves. It is possible to run a review site but there will always be people who disagree with the reviews. Then there will be micro-hosters who claim to be "Ireland's largest/best/biggest/fastest hoster". Running a review site for a market as small as Ireland really isn't worth the grief of dealing with such muppetry.

A lot of the smaller hosters tend to be just resellers and the turnover at the lower end of the market can be quite extreme. One year you can see a small hoster doing well and seeming to grow month on month but when you look at the domains you sometimes find that many of them are owned by the hoster itself and are not even active. Some of them survive but it is more common to spot the blood trails eighteen months or so later as they begin to shed domains in an effort to remain solvent.

The Irish hosting market is a very competitive one and very business orientated. It is very much a buyers market.

Regards...jmcc

Eoin

There is www.irishwebmasterforum.com but it's not going to be completely impartial.

mneylon

There aren't any Irish only hosting review sites - the market's probably too small to sustain any

You'll find reviews of Irish hosts on *some* of the international hosting reviews sites, but I suspect that there aren't that many reviews out there.

There are no discussions of hosting providers on boards.ie any more since there were issues with catfights when there was a hosting forum

There are threads about various providers over on http://www.creativeireland.com and on http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com

There might be a few threads over on http://www.askaboutmoney.com