Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

It’s only been two weeks since we moved the websites on the American hosts from Powweb who couldn’t even manage to get the basic hosting account set up first time which says something about the poor quality of their support as they only offer one hosting plan so it should be a click and it’s done type of operation.

Lunarpages managed to get the account set up perfectly first time which isn’t really staggering praise as it’s what they do so they should get it right first time. However, the uptime has been dire for the two weeks. Week one saw the sites being down for around an hour per day so I fired off a support ticket asking my account to be moved to a more reliable server. The response was that they’d rebooted it and sorted out a “few issues” at the same time. It did improve alright but only for a couple of days and now it’s just going from bad to worse with downtime amounting to almost an hour less than half-way through the day.

Anyway, ’tis off once more and I’m in the process of downloading the first site that’s going to be heading for Integra-Net which I’ve heard a lot of really good things about and has the other plus point that they’re under $35/year for the hosting plan that I need.

What’s confusing me is why the hosting services are so unreliable though. With exactly the same site monitoring package in place my UK host is showing downtime of several minutes per week (presumably when they reboot the server) and, no, it’s not a UK based monitoring service.

Just as there never seems to be a single bus around, so too it seems to be with house buyers.

With the market having slowed down considerably in the UK, selling in markets that are dependent on that market is also pretty slow. However, that seems to be changing as we’ve now had three quite serious house views in the space of two weeks.

Now, if only we can persuade one to part with a large cheque…

We’ve had our place listed with several estate agents for a while now and had sort-of settled into the thinking that it would sell “sometime” but probably not that soon.

These days, you get a lot of “window shoppers” when you’re trying to get a decent price for your place and we’ve had our share of those through normal estate agents.

However, one estate agent that we listed with some time ago and heard nothing from since got in touch last week to see about a visit on Saturday. They’d said at the outset that they pre-vet purchasers to the extent of checking in advance not only what they’re looking for but also that they’ve got the resources to pay for it and made a point of saying that they’d only be around with “serious buyers”.  Total estate-agent speak if ever there was an example of it we thought.

The call was surprising on several fronts. We’d not heard from them in ages so figured that they’d forgotten about us which was a shame as we’d originally thought that they would be the people who’d sell it for us. More surprising in some ways was that the appointment was for Saturday morning: I always figured that estate agents were strictly Monday to Friday people but apparently not.

Although our place is pretty large, usually we’d people round it in maybe an hour and then a little chat afterwards. These people were here well over two hours and were only asking the kind of questions that you’d ask if you were pretty serious about a place: can we buy that land for a pool?, can we build on that section? and so on.

We still don’t know if they’ll buy the place as they’d seen several other places in the area but the estate agent was talking of getting an architect in to see how much the changes they’d like would cost. If they run to that, I think we may need to start preparing for a fairly quick move as they seemed very proactive.

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).