Foreign Perspectives

As you may know, I’ve been experimenting with the hosting location of several of my websites over the last few months and indeed years.

To begin with I hosted mascamps.com in America basically because that’s where my earlier websites lived and it was handy to just add the new one to the existing account. Anyway, about a year after we got here the various Our Inns had started off on 1and1.co.uk basically because it was handier to have multiple domains in one account but only pay for one webspace account.

Anyway, come 2006 and I needed to upgrade the account to run the database version of the Inns sites. That meant, on 1and1, a move from £25/year to £10/month so I started shopping round and ended up plumping for godaddy in the USA. Snag was that almost immediately after the move, the site traffic started dropping. In fact it ended up dropping 90% before I figured that perhaps £10/month wasn’t too bad after all and, guess what?, well the traffic went up x10 in the two weeks following the move back to the UK!

So, of course, over the year or so after that I gradually moved everything to 1and1 UK. Well, I say “UK” but in fact it’s actually in Germany.

Soooo, come this year I started wondering about hosting in the UK properly. Up ’til quite recently that’s been quite expensive as I need a sort-of “reseller” account in that I need to be able to use the one webspace but have lots of domains pointing to it. However, now it’s dropped to around £20/year (eukhost.com) so time for another experiment.

OK, not so spectacular this time but a jump of around 100% in site traffic does seem worthwhile so over the coming winter I’ll be moving the rest of the sites over and thereby a) getting a lot more traffic and b) saving a fortune compared to 1and1.

What I’ve not done until now is to try out a .co.uk domain for sites largely aimed at the UK market. That’s in the process of changing as I’m putting Whole Earth Guide on a .co.uk domain to see how it goes. Snag is that I’ve not really got a truly comparable domain to check the performance against.