Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

It took five and a half hours to download yesterday but finally I’ve got a DVD with Ubuntu (Linux) on it.

Setting up the computer to run both Vista and Ubuntu turned out to be surprisingly simple. All that I needed to do was to shrink the partition that contains Vista to make some room to install Ubuntu (you do that from disk management in Windows XP or Vista).

Next up was installing Ubuntu which was very simple and after the usual language and timezone selection, it installed and configured itself leaving me the option of loading up Vista or Ubuntu when I power up the machine.

The one problem so far is that I’ve not got the wifi card working but I’m installing the Ubuntu updates as I write this so perhaps it’ll be operational afterwards. As usual, there are a few drivers to be loaded so I can’t watch my videos ’til the updates are all installed for example.

Interestingly, you can use the Vista partition just as if it were part of Ubuntu. If I were doing the install again, I’d be inclined to just create a big enough partition for Ubuntu and hold the files in the Vista partition rather than try and make the Ubuntu partition as large as possible.

Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side of the Atlantic and monitored them to see how things went.

Naturally, the profile of the site visitors changed depending on where they were notionally hosted. So, an American site would obviously pull in more Americans and a European site would pull in more British. However, the google trick only works for google of course and we sometimes get significant traffic from other search engines and, as always, there’s a lot of traffic that you can’t pin down to a specific source.

In the meantime, we were running down the sites hosted on our original European host which was going to save us something like $20/month once that exercise was complete (European hosting services are mostly complete ripoffs). So, we pencilled in some of that to establish a beach head in America. In fact, for under $100 a year we managed to get both a primary and a backup hosting service!

Obviously, the new sites won’t do overlly well to begin with so our little experiment will need to run for at least a year before we’ll know if it was a worthwhile experiment. Somehow I think that it will: already we have picked up one new property listing in America and they’ve already got a booking from us!

We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that WordPress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).

There seem to be as many sites reviewing hosting sites as there are hosting sites to be reviewed so perhaps it’s no surprise that just about any hosting service can find itself at the top 10 of the listings somewhere.

The sheer number of hosting services available is just amazing too. Whilst I was looking for a new hosting service I came across one or two that seemed to list hundreds of services. Although it’s not the most comprehensive, Website Hosting Jury lists almost 600 which should perhaps give you some idea of how great the choice is these days.

What’s not so evident is how one might choose the “best”. Most of those on WHJ have only one review which I dropped immediately from my shortlist but even just counting those with more than 50 reviews still leaves 24. Many of those in the top 10 actually have quite bad ratings which isn’t a good sign as they have from 80 through to 220 reviews each.

Of those top 24, there are relatively few that combine good economy with good service (if good marks on WHJ can be said to indicate good service): U2-web, Polur Net, RealWebHost, Integra-Net, ICD Soft, BlurStorm, LunarPages, Banana Hosting and HostGator. We need a lot of addon domains which narrows that list down to IntegraNet, LunarPages and HostGator of which we went with LunarPages on the basis that IntegraNet at $32/year sounded a little too cheap and HostGator at $10/month was a little too expensive. Having said that, I’d be quite tempted to start using IntegraNet as our backup host at some point (you can get both IntegraNet and LunarPages for less than it costs for HostGator) and were we only running personal sites, I’d have gone for it as the main host.

It’s taken three days and in the end I had to send an e-mail to their sales department saying that I wanted to cancel the hosting account to get any action. Now they’re saying that they are expediting the work on it.

It’s still not working though and, supposedly, they’ve now been working on it for around half a day.

I’m persisting with the cancellation as I’m wondering how long it will take them to get around to getting the account fully operational (I’m assuming that I’ll find more things that they’ve not set up properly).