I am with a Canadian based consumer company and we are about to launch websites in 6+ European markets, plus a site in Japan and Australia. For business reasons it makes sense to have all the sites hosted on the one set of servers in a central location - which we feel should be Canada for taxation reasons, so that our head office production department maintains control over the maintenace and updating process and the fact that we have no technical resources in our overseas markets.

It has been suggested that we should host all of the sites centrally in the UK, our major European market due to the faster load times that visitors to the site would experience.

What is the difference in load times for European users if the site was hosted in Canada vs UK.

Are there any other considerations that we should take into account before we decide the hosting location??

Thanks - any comments or previous experience gratefully received!!

This thread may be of some assistance :

http://www.webhostlink.com/showthread.php?threadid=2493

If you do a further search on the forum you'll find that generally hosting in the UK is a fraction more expensive than if you host in the US or Canada.

I've worked slightly and briefly on UK servers, and found US access was darned good... for whatever that tells you.

More to the point, though, I think if I were setting up an operation of this kind, I'd very definitely spend a few dollars renting space on several servers; then run some serious testing for a month or so.

The performance of the servers across your market base is a serious concern, and the sort of thing one perhaps shouldn't second-guess. One way of looking at it would be to profile a scenario where sour server performance lost you even one percent of trade. What would that cost your business?

Simply put, the best way to find out which is best is to go try the real goods. It'd be money well spent.

I looking to host a UK audience site in the US, and did a fairly thorough search of hosts in both countries. From what I found the costs of hosting in the UK are far more expensive than in the US. In particular the cost of bandwidth is unbelievably expensive. I found most UK hosts were looking to charge £50/GB of extra bandwidth. Also the upper limits of bandwith on most hosting packages are generally between 0.5 - 2.0 GB month, and I could find one offering more than 5GB in a package. I think you may find the bandwith charges for dedicated servers are similarly high. I know UK2 do very cheap dedicated servers, but they only include 5GB bandwidth (They claim you can host over 200 sites on that!).

Good Luck

I find Canadian web sites to be much slower then say US ones. Can you name me a fast Canadian host?

Anyway, the UK is more expensive then the US by a long shot. If you did go to the UK then you would have to be serious about your hosting. Most ISPs only offer basic web space, no fancy features, and charge large sums.

If hosting really is important, and you have money to throw at it, go with one of the 'big boys' like Cable & Wireless, BT, Globix, Concentric or UUNET. They all have NOC's in the UK well connected to their global networks.

However, there rates are high. There is little choice in between a few megs basic space at $30 (equiv) per month and the $100's to go with the big people.

The USA is the best bet to be honest. The UK really is a poor showing.

On that same note - Alabanza and VDI servers are very responsive from the UK on a range of providers.

You can do some preliminary checking-out of routes and performance at places like http://www.tracert.com/

stu,

I find Tera-byte http://www.tera-byte.com to be quite fast wherever I access from the world...

Hmmm, the only thing turning me away from tera-byte (aswell as its use of RAQ's :)) was it was rather sluggish :(

I suppose im too used to those highly responsive, bandwidth guzzlers at VDI and Alabanza.

The only UK providers worth mentioning would be:

webfusion - http://www.webfusion.co.uk and http://www.dedicated-servers.co.uk

both the same company, but bandwidth is expensive.

"The only UK providers worth mentioning would be:

webfusion - http://www.webfusion.co.uk and http://www.dedicated-servers.co.uk "

It's this sort of attitude that I really enjoy when it comes to UK webhosting, just because they are one of the biggest it does not make them the best. There are other good UK hosts out there.

We have had a number of customers move over from Webfusion to our service, all come with mis-conceptions that they will always get bad support in this industry.

Webfusion may have a new 1million pound datacentre, but they themselves said they had "2x 2mbit/sec lines" from their 2 first providers (this was sometime in 99 or late 98). This was at the stage where they said they were hosting 100,000 domains - kind of explains the bandwidth limitiations they place on accounts.

Here are some UK hosts that I recommend, through personally dealings with them, and having hosted websites in the past:

- Devilnet.co.uk
(Have lots of servers with colossus, owner is a very nice guy and they have a good reputation)
- UKshells.co.uk
Meant to be pretty good
- The big providers like, Demon, Clara.net etc

There are of course many others..

*Disclaimer, this post expresses the personal opinions of myself, Jordan Gross, and is not representitive of the opinions of Ultraspeed UK Limited*

Regards,

Jordan

Jordan, I know there are several UK based companies, my point was to try and think of any that actually had their servers in the UK.

Not many do, most co-locate (for obvious reasons) in the US. Devilnet appears like it uses Alabanza servers, which is great. Although they claim to offer unlimited data transfer, though I have not heard any complaints... anyway.


I know it seems a mighty generalisation, but the market in the UK is crying out for someone to offer some good deals on hosting with a UK based server.

It seems SO obvious, but there is very little.

[Edited by stu on 10-27-2000 at 07:04 AM]

The main reason that most UK hosts do not have servers in the UK is the same reason that HSBC has moved its Internet operations to the USA and the same reason that most UK hosts who do have servers in the country seem to think that having a couple of 2MBit lines is really fast and really good - The UK has a poor internet infrastructure for ISPs and WebHosts.

The costs are another thing, the cheapest price we were quoted for a decent dedicated server (At a company with good bandwidth - not just a couple of 2MBit lines) was over £1200 a month - Now doesn't that make Alabanza's $800 look reasonable?

I am a UK based web host selling mainly into the US market using US based servers.

There is very little to be gained in speed by using a UK based host because all data goes through LINX (The london Internet Exchange).

There is a major co-location facility only a few miles from me and their servers are only fractionally faster from here than my set up at Alabanza because the number of nodes (hops) in the network to get to me via my ISP is similar.

If you are concerned about availability or speed you could use "round robin" DNS to spread your load across more than one copy of your site on different servers.

You will also find that there are no companies in the UK offering web hosting facilities like Alabanza otr VDI with built in management systems.

The UK market is quite different to the USA. People in the UK either want it all for nothing or they are suspicious of cheap hosting. I have found it virtually impossible to sell my product in the UK even though by international standards its of good quality and medium priced and we have a seperate brand and website (Hostroute.co.uk)

Gordon

Since someone said the magic 'A' word somewhere in this thread, I'll put in my $0.02 about Australian web hosts.

In general, Aussie hosts charge exorbitant prices. Many features we take for granted are often either absent or cost extra. There are a few well priced Aussie hosts, but it turns out they use American servers.

In terms of speed, I find that the Alabanza and OLM based servers are actually faster than many of the local hosts. A problem though is that when the backbones connecting Sydney to LA / San Francisco get congested, anything from overseas happens exceedingly slow. Then again, I use a cheap ISP which doesn't have much redundancy in its network, so it probably doesn't affect everyone.

If the money doesn't scare you, go for someone like Webcentral (www.webcentral.com.au) - big, (very) expensive and reliable. Don't go near Chilli (www.chilli.net.au) (nothing to do with Chilliboy :) ) - I've yet to seen a month where their uptime is higher than 95%. If money is an issue, host your site in the States.

Of course, for the best of both worlds, you could host with an Aussie based firm with US servers like my soon-to-be company...

EX-S,

Totally agreed on Australian servers. Blame Telstra and the US Government for charging us exorbitant bandwidth prices ;)

(in case anyone wonders why I'm inferring to the US Govt., they have an agreement with bandwidth/backbone providers to force other nations to pay for international bandwidth)