Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

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).

I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise.

Not a good move as it turned out.

Uploading the databases and HTML was very easy and much faster than expected. But nothing worked… it took them a day to find out that they’d not installed the PHP software for me.

Then things seemed to work. In fact, everything worked fine ’til I tried some pages that use encoded characters (for the French e-acute etc.) and none of them worked. That was two days ago and they’ve still not worked out how to fix the problem so I’m now in the process of cancelling the account with them.

Why the different experience? Well, Brooke has been with them for years and up to April 2006 they were one of the best places around so any teething troubles that she may have had were sorted out under the old regime. In 2006 they were taken over by Endurance and from then on the support had rapidly become worse. That’s not reflected (yet) in most of the review sites as they generally take account of all reviews so, of course, most of them predate the 2006 takeover.

Anyway, I’m off to try another place over there now.

Over the next few days it’s going to be pretty hectic here as the Spanish are coming, as usual for their pre-Easter break.

Also, as usual, they wait ’til the last minute to book. Just a few weeks ago, we had nobody down for the next few days yet as of tomorrow we’re pretty much full until Monday and everyone is from Spain.

The last minute business seems to be getting worse each year as we had several days worth of bookings arriving this morning including the first double booking for the year. The last minute aspect is something that none of the booking systems are really geared up for in that it can be several hours between the guest booking and the system notifying us of that booking which, of course, is plenty of time for a competing reservation system to slip in another booking for the same dates.

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.