Hi,

 

I've just registered a .co.uk domain with fasthosts but for obvious reasons, don't want to host my site with them.

 

I've looked at various UK hosts and am honestly not enthused with any of them as they tend to operate on fixed-term contracts and the fees charged, seem too high for the services offered when compared to US hosting.

I've equally seen a lot of top-rated hosts like hostpapa that have the same page design as lots of other 'top-hosts' which is less than encouraging given it appears to be an umbrella corp giving each other great reviews. All the review sites seem to be fixed? I'm aware there may be a lot of people gaming the review systems for topics such as these and can see that even this forum suffers with people spamming the board with reseller ads. Basically, i don't trust the hosting world in the slightest.

 

Anyway, I have however heard a lot of great (and more reliable sounding) reviews for Hostgator. They're cheap, month-by-month contracts and offer everything i need.

 

My only question is, given .co.uk TLDs are auto-targeted with Google for the UK andway, will my page-rank suffer due to a US IP?

 

Any advice on the subject is greatly appreciated and if anyone hosts a .co.uk TLD with HG and has personal experience with them than even more so.

 

Cheers.

Hi,

 

I've just registered a .co.uk domain with fasthosts but for obvious reasons, don't want to host my site with them.

 

I've looked at various UK hosts and am honestly not enthused with any of them as they tend to operate on fixed-term contracts and the fees charged, seem too high for the services offered when compared to US hosting.

I've equally seen a lot of top-rated hosts like hostpapa that have the same page design as lots of other 'top-hosts' which is less than encouraging given it appears to be an umbrella corp giving each other great reviews. All the review sites seem to be fixed? I'm aware there may be a lot of people gaming the review systems for topics such as these and can see that even this forum suffers with people spamming the board with reseller ads. Basically, i don't trust the hosting world in the slightest.

 

Anyway, I have however heard a lot of great (and more reliable sounding) reviews for Hostgator. They're cheap, month-by-month contracts and offer everything i need.

 

My only question is, given .co.uk TLDs are auto-targeted with Google for the UK andway, will my page-rank suffer due to a US IP?

 

Any advice on the subject is greatly appreciated and if anyone hosts a .co.uk TLD with HG and has personal experience with them than even more so.

 

Cheers.

 

 

I don't think HostGator have servers in the UK. There is no written statement by Google (as far as I know) which says SEO is penalised where the website is in another country, however, recently, they have started prioritising websites by their speed, so if your website is in the US, they may make it less of a priority to users on google.co.uk.

 

SEO isn't the only factor you should consider though. If most of your users are in the UK, you ought to aim for a server in the UK to ensure their connection to your website is quick.

 

Feel free to email me your specifications and I should be able to give you a custom quote depending on what suites you best. Good luck.

Comparing UK hosting to US hosting is also highly unfair...

 

Bandwidth cost's in the US are far cheaper than they are here in the UK, and as you can see, a lot of US host's oversell like hosting is going out of fashion, although a LOT of the big UK companies do it too, which makes proper hosting "look" expensive, when in fact, hosting where ZERO overselling goes on actually will give you far better tolerances for scripts and resource usage.

 

For example, take a loot at the vbulletin forums and search for hostgator...

 

Their tolerances for resource usage are REALLY low, something close to 2% server usage, and a limit on the number of files you can upload too, as well as being 5000+ miles away with ping times being 25x that of most UK host's, so would you really want those "unlimited users as your neighbours or your site being shut down regularly for "server abuse" lol...

 

Typical example, some of our customers scripts regularly hit 40% usage, but thats not a problem because we dont oversell, dont impose silly file limits, we just sell exactly what is realistic. Why sell 10GB of web space, then say "you cant upload more than 50,000 files, and cant stream video or music etc etc, its really not a fair comparison to put US hosting beside UK hosting at all....

 

And yes, website speed is a factor with search rankings, but although not documented, many SEO experts are finding that IP locations are becoming a factor in returning results, as search engines are ever searching for ways to return more and more relevant results to searchers...

 

Nobody wants to search for a plumber and be presented with results from websites thousands of miles away.

Try it for yourself... Go to google and do a 1 word search for "plumber" and see how close and relevant the top 10 results are.

 

For me, the first 10 results are all UK based websites with the first 6 being in Croydon itself, and thats from a 1 word search for plumber...

 

Speaks for itself...

Hello,

 

I have suffered this problem I wanted a good host that was affordable but be UK based datacentre. I needed a VPS rather than shared hosting and I found linode. They have UK servers at US prices. I use them for UK projects and stuck all my non geo sensitive stuff and test sites on dreamhost as they seemed to have a good pricing for unlimited plans.

 

Ta

 

Dave