I live in the UK and am looking change host soon - after 2 years with a UK based host. I am very tempted by the features and prices of some US based hosts ... but wonder if there will be any practical or technical disadvantage of 'going abroad' for this new host?

I am happy to sacrifice telephone support, but are there any other issues I should be aware of?

With thanks.

well, that depends on what you are doing. If you go with a web site in another country, that web site operates by the laws of the country it is in. These may be very different than what you are used too. I am particularly thinking of libel issues here. You may be saying something on your web site that is totally OK in your country but is illegal in the country of the web host. Could cause problems. (see...dow jones and Australia).

If you are just doing a personal site I doubt if that would be any big deal. But if you are operating some type of business site I would consider the matter more carefully.

Daniel

In my 7 to 8 years of hosting, I have never hosted with a local web hoster but been doing it with US-based ones. There is only so much you can do with Telephone Support and I feel that email support is something more than appropriate for me. Actually, you wouldn't face much loss in that area. I am just not a fan of phone support.

The only issue is really the legal issues. If the host fails to provide, being in a different legal jurisdication might not get you very far if you intend to sue the host. But beyond that, I am fine with foreign host as long as they provide what I need.

Most web host provides some form of 24/7/365 support so no matter what timezone, you get your reply.

Legal issues were the last thing on my mind - but thanks for mentioning this important subject. One site is specialist cycle-racing mail order business, so low legal risk I think. The other sites are also very low risk in this respect, despite one being bolox.com (I always say it has a silent x)!

I'll probably move to a US host in next couple of weeks. Thanks for your input.

Another point that's commonly brought up is really how fast the site respond. e.g ping times and such. It is true that if all or most of your visitors are based in UK, you would most likely get a faster response time. But remember that in most cases it doesn't really matter. For example our site pings about 100ms in UK and average around 50ms in US. While a doubling of the ping times seems a lot, 50ms is rather fast to be really that much noticable.

Lastly for a website, ping times don't really matter that much. Even a ping time of 300ms can be perfectly fine

Ping times is also not equals to download speed. You can have a high ping but still download at your maximum speed.

So if you get people telling you this (I am sure UK host will cite this if you ask them this question), this information will be useful I am sure.

Make sure you're okay with not being able to call them for support too; unless you don't mind the international call price. :-)