Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘America’ Category

I find myself in the unusual (for me) position of thinking about setting up a company in America.

How did that come about? Well, some back of the envelope calculations indicate that there could be a lot of money to be made were some of my websites hosted in America and in some circumstances it looks like doing that might produce a tax liability for me over there so to ringfence that, it looks like the simplest long term solution would be to run the sites via a US based company. If that situation comes to pass (I’ll not know if it’s likely to for several months) it seems likely that I’d end up running all the income through said US company purely to simplify matters tax-wise for myself.

Anyway, because of all that, I’ve started looking into how one might go about setting up the company and it looks like it’s a whole lot simpler than it is setting up a UK company. The place to form it seems to be Delaware in that if you don’t make any income in that state then you’ve only $60/year tax to pay them which is dead handy for me as the websites are likely to be hosted in Texas. Setting up the company costs around $200 all-in and after that it’s under $100/year running costs although I imagine that I’d be needing an American accountant at some point if things really took off (can’t see it somehow).

One side-effect of doing that would be that I could even move to America if the income were high enough in that I could obviously employ myself.

Still, all that’s dependent on the website working really well in America and, of course, it might not.

Some years ago I moved all my websites from a US hosting service over to a UK one to take advantage of the search engine boost that you get when your sites are hosted in the country where your target audience are searching from.

Ironically, now I find myself moving some of those same websites back to America in order to pick up traffic from the US itself. That’s happened because the sites are now much larger and much more global in scope so there should be a certain advantage in hosting in the US to reach the US audience.

Now, the question is: will the jump in traffic be anything like the 30 fold jump that I picked up on moving the sites over to the UK in the past? Well, I should know in a few weeks for sure but, so far, the traffic appears to be higher than it was when the site that I’ve just moved over was living in the UK.

Interest rate changes by central banks are peculiar affairs.

For one thing, the banks aren’t actually obliged to respond by lowering interest rates although, usually, they do so by a similar amount. It’s usually a similar amount rather than exactly the same amount though which affects people differently: it’s common for banks to drop interest rates on savings accounts by a little more than the cut the central bank announces and loan rates by no more than is announced.

That sounds like they’re ripping you off, and to some extent they are, but what kicks in is the effect of their own administration on the processing of the loans and savings. Even if the central bank cut rates to zero, there would still be a charge for loans as that represents a risk to the bank, and savings rates would drop to zero or possibly a little below that as obviously there is a cost to processing savings too (they’d probably introduce charges rather than negative interest rates).

High interest products tend to represent higher risks so the rates on those aren’t always cut at all following a rate cut announcement.

And, of course, if you’ve a fixed rate loan then the payments on that will stay the same.

Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base.

That particular move worked really well in that I ended up with around 30x (yes, thirty times) the traffic that I’d had on the original American hosting service. That’s with no changes in the website apart from where it was hosted.

Ironically, now I’m looking to move some sites in the opposite direction as they now have more of a global audience than the collection of sites from a few years ago did.

Now, the big question I’m wondering about is whether I’ll get a 30x jump in traffic in going the other direction?

Since it’s St Patrick’s Day, we thought it was a great day to add our entry for Downpatrick on our world guide where, argueably, he’s buried under a massive stone in the chuch graveyard.

Naturally, there’s nothing on over here for St Patrick’s and we were hoping to get over to Dublin for the parades but, yet again, didn’t quite manage it between one thing and another.

As it happens though, by far the largest parade is in New York!