High

I'm setting up a UK website which I anticipate as having a pretty high amount of traffic. I've looked at lots of UK hosts, and on a £ for £ basis their specs are well below those of US counterparts.

I'm therefore considering hosting with a US company. Does anyone have any views on how this could affect performance speed for UK viewers? I'm only guessing at this, but my thoughts are that if a higher spec US server may still be quicker than a lower spec UK server - which I would get for the same cost.

I've had a look at a few sites which review hosts, and HostPro seems to be constantly among the most highly rated (webhostmagazine.com & wedhostdir.com). Has anyone had personal experience.

I had a look at their packages, and they seem excellent. They seem to offer the high bandwith I am looking for at very competitive prices. Also the additional stuff that comes with their packages looks excellent.

Any help appreciated

This is something I looked long and hard at before locating my sites in the USA.

Provided the data centre where the site is hosted has a good connection to the UK there will be little, or no, difference in speed.
It certainly won't be noticeable to the visitors.

Unfortunately, there are still Web Gurus in the UK who remember the days before ISP's when the number of hops mattered.
Now that everything goes through LYNX (the London Internet Exchange) it doesn't matter where the server is, the data still has to go through the same route, so geographical proximity to the server means nothing.

There's a big colocation facility a few miles from here that is no faster in practice than my server at Alabanza in Maryland.

Crazy - but true.

Gordon

I'm from the uk and i find it hard to find webhosts that give a large amount of bandwidth in the uk. I have both my sites that are live hosted at http://www.hostrocket.com and http://www.tera-byte.com they are both good hosts and give lots of bandwidth and fast support.

Yes,
The model in the UK is very low annual payments with a lot of add on costs (especially for bandwidth).
In the case of one major UK web host they even charge extra for a cgi-bin and restrict file sizes to 2MB.

Gordon

Cheers for the help. Looks like I'll definately hosts US from your views.

Anyone with a view on Hostpro.com, as said previously it looks to have had excellent reviews from a few online sites.

I know that many of these sites are suspect, due to advertising - I also don't believe the 'readers reviews' - far to easily to be manipulated.

I'm really going off webhostmagazine.com - they look fairly impartial - far better than most anyway.

Well I can attest that Hostpro has the bandwidth. Hostpro/Micron bought several hosts and isps.

Chiliboy,

Use the 'search' function up the top and you'll see plenty of recommendations. I believe HostPro has been quite reasonable, but you might want to check up on other boards before you make a final decision.

The UK vs US server location seems to be an ongoing arguement, we made a decision to locate in the USA, Near New York- which definetly has an affect on our hop count.

Consider this, its 13 hops from me here at home in London, to our servers, it can be a similar number if I'm tracing to a site up north or something, or if a backbone provider in the UK has designed its network without latency in mind.

My 2 cents:)