United Kingdom site goes live and further international presences are in the planning
Rochen Host is today pleased to announce the roll out of our United Kingdom website at http://www.rochenhost.co.uk or http://www.rochen.com/uk. This is the first in a series of international sites we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months.

Our UK site allows users to make payment in UK pounds sterling (GBP). This option is also available to existing customers should they wish to change their payment method from US Dollars to UK pounds sterling.


Services
All our feature rich packages will remain the same for our UK site as they are for our United States and Worldwide site. You can view the full range of UK services at: http://www.rochen.com/uk.

Connections to UK & Worldwide Internet
Unlike many hosting companies, we have excellent backbones on to the UK and Worldwide Internet. This allows people accessing your website from within the UK or anywhere in the world for that matter fast and reliable access to your internet presence.


Customer Services

UK & US
Whether you purchase your web hosting account via our United States or United Kingdom site, you will receive the same level of fanatical customer care.

Voted 9.8 out of 10
In a recent customer survey [April 2002] Rochen customers ranked our overall performance which included speed, uptime and technical support 9.8 out of a possible 10. Rochen are always striving to provide better services!

15 Day money back guarantee
Both our Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux plans now come with a full 15 day money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with our service within the first 15 days we will give you a complete and unconditional refund. The money back guarantee doesn't apply to accounts where a domain name is ordered.

No overselling
We don't oversell our bandwidth or disk space. We don't offer 10GB transfer for $2 per month. Our prices are based around a carefully laid out and realistic business plan. Our prices take into account the technical costs (bandwidth, server running costs etc.) and human resource costs (technical support, server management etc.). In this competitive market, a lot of hosting companies forget about the "human resource costs".

Rochen Host URLs
United States & World Wide: http://www.rochen.com or http://www.rochenhost.com
United Kingdom: http://www.rochen.com/uk or http://www.rochenhost.co.uk


Further Questions
If you have any questions about our products or services please visit our website. Feel free to contact our sales team anytime at sales@rochen.com or contact myself personally via chris@rochen.com and we will be more than happy to assist you.

Thank you for reading :)

Congratulations :)

May I ask for which countries you're going to develop a site for? Countries in the Euro-zone?

We will be combining all the countries who use the Euro into an additional site. So Europe will probably be the next stop :)

Question is, are the sites hosted in the UK ?

From the looks of your site, their not.

The issue is AFAIK, if someone were to store personally identifiable information then they are not legally allowed to host in the US without a written contractural agreement.

This is the major issue I have with hosting overseas. I'd like to take advantage of the better deals, but I don't want any data protection legal hassles.

Originally posted by gdpayne
Question is, are the sites hosted in the UK ?
No, servers are US based.

The issue is AFAIK, if someone were to store personally identifiable information then they are not legally allowed to host in the US without a written contractural agreement.
I have never heard this law before, but should it be true everyone who subscribes to services like AOL. Amazon.com are all breaking the law?

I have a copy of the data protection act kicking about here, I will check this out, if I can find it :)


This is the major issue I have with hosting overseas. I'd like to take advantage of the better deals, but I don't want any data protection legal hassles.
This means any service who hosts in the US that you give personal information to, you have just broken the law? This seems a bit far fetched if you ask me...


It also means if you buy hosting from a UK company, they may well be using a US or even a UK credit card processor hosted in the US. That means your personal information has just been sent to the US.

I have never read any section in the data protection act which says this, however if you can point the section out I would gladly take your word for it :D

Try:

http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/dpr/dpdoc.nsf/ed1e7ff5aa6def30802566360045bf4d/da73cccd1e57ded3802568d6004c6306/$FILE/TRANSBOR.doc

Now, I'm no where near a lawyer. In fact my eyes glaze over at the sight of this 'simple explanation' document. But advice at work seems to be that there is a potential issue with the transfer of personal data to/from the US (check para 12.1), since the US doesn't have the right laws to protect personal data.

Personally, I'd love someone to tell be there is no issue, but I don't want to find out the hard way !

Originally posted by gdpayne
Now, I'm no where near a lawyer

Neither am I :) I just think this thing may be to far fetched or something that doesn't ever get imposed. To be quite honest, have you ever heard of a case like this? Also, as I said above, if this is law thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of UK citizens will be breaking this law daily...

Never underestimate the ability of a government to be stupid. The bigger they are, the more stupid they are.

Saying that, protecting personal privacy does make a nice change from infringing it.

I've asked the question of our local guru, so hopefully there should be a good answer soon.

Mind you, if it does work in the way their wording suggests, it does provide you with a nice little opportunity. Sort out the right defined contract statements etc. that put you on the right side of the act - you can then use that as a reason for EU customers to go to you rather than another host!

FUD........ works for Microsoft ;)

Originally posted by gdpayne
I've asked the question of our local guru, so hopefully there should be a good answer soon.

Great, please post and let us know the outcome :)