Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

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).

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.