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.

As you can see we’ve started offering the option to buy prints of the photographs from this site and others that we run.

However, as soon as we started doing that we hit the problem that the resolution of our camera ain’t good enough to produce the largest prints and indeed isn’t high enough for the images to be accepted by some services.

Related to that we’re now looking for more images for our Whole Earth Guide and it seems to make sense to do something about the camera for that too (we’re hoping that we can supply the majority of the photographs for that from our own picture library).

Which is where we hit our dilema. We have a massive library of slide photographs and could continue to take those using the Nikon F3 but would need a slide scanner to be able to use them properly. That would run to £500 or more.

Alternatively we could buy something like the Nikon D40x (also £500+) and use that to build the library for the future.

At the moment I don’t know which way to go. Ideally, of course, we’d buy both but there isn’t enough money in the site development kitty to do that.

Google’s adsense is a peculiar product in many ways.

On the one hand it seems to pull up adverts that are just what people are looking for on webpages. Yet, if you think about it, they’ve arrived at that webpage looking for something and presumably haven’t found it if they’re clicking on one of the adverts.

That being the case, sites that are full of useful content don’t do too well from the adsense point of view. So, for instance this site is quite information rich yet doesn’t get a whole lot of income from adsense. Similarly, our Pyrenees guide is fairly packed with information (and getting more complete by the day as we’re in the midst of an update) but does quite poorly in terms of adsense.

So, what we’re planning is to have an experimental site which is designed with adsense in mind to see if that does better. Anyway, that’s why Whole Earth Guide will be a little light on content (well, that plus we won’t be properly starting on it ’til after September).

Hopefully we’ll manage to get all the right keywords packed in to get people to the site and adsense will provide them with the content that they’re really looking for.

The travel news site from RatesToGo isn’t the “in your face” promo of their bookings site that it could so easily be and in fact has gone to the other extreme with only a logo to indicate that they even run a hotel booking service.

That makes it quite an interesting site to read as it covers a really wide range of articles such as the most expensive hotel room (in Las Vegas) which at $40,000 is hardly one that you’ll be booking through their site.

They do link to hotels on their site for instance in their top 10 binge drinking getaways but that’s not really limiting the content of this very informative blog as the range of hotels which they have doesn’t act as a limitation to them. Besides their occassional self-promo is more than offset by general travel articles such as the beds on Lufthansa flights.

Overall, it looks like they write the articles then look for a suitable hotel on their list. As in their piece on Japanese fireworks festivals where the mention of the hotel seems very much an afterthought.

At the moment this is a fairly young blog: let’s hope that they maintain the variety of articles that they’ve produced up to now.

Although we’re in the midst of the busiest season of the year, the first offer of a free listing has just arrived!

Of course the reason for this is that the gite people already have all the bookings that they want for this year so should just be starting on their marketing for next year. In practice most of them don’t seem to really get underway until September or even October but they’ll already have renewed their inprint advertising (the deadline is usually around June!).

The B&B people however are totally swamped at the moment and should stay that way until they get September out of the way so there’s not a whole lot of point in offering them discounted listings and whatnot at the moment.

In true mercernary style it’s best not to take up the 6 month free offers ’til early in the year (probably around January/February for gites, around March/April for B&B) to maximise the benefit of the free period and indeed to get a fair comparison of the free offer with other competing offers.

Anyway, we’ll probably be restarting our “junk mail” programme later in the month. Our sites are a little different though in that we are free all the time so why not sign up (B&B, self-catering or hotel) at our signup page?