Posted by spessex on February 7, 2012 at 11:38pm
Similar to last post I'd also like to hear what people have to say about using US based hosts for serving mostly UK targeted sites? Is there anything to consider (with the exception of obvious time delays for support)?
Thank you
Stephen
Comments
Generally speaking US based
Generally speaking US based hosts tend to be a lot slower in Europe compared to Germany or Holland based servers. I've tried many of them and I generally find that there's usually not a big difference between countries BUT there's a big drop in speed when you cross the ocean. Since the audience for the sites I build is europe-targeted I don't use US-based servers any more and would recommend against it.
If you're looking for a more personal suggestion I have more than 30 europe-targeted drupal sites on http://hostingjuice.com
They have servers in both the countries mentioned above (Germany and Holland) and their VPSs are simply great. I would definitely recommend their XEN servers (I've had trouble with OpenVZ and Drupal). If on the other hand your site is more on the "light" side, not that heavy and you don't expect a lot of traffic you could always go for a shared plan (I have a dozen small sites running on a shared hosting plan, no problems at all).
Worth looking into, depending
Worth looking into, depending on budget of course, is companies such as for example Amazon and Rackspace that has data centers in on both sides. They have solutions to minimize the lag to, including of course the possibility of have servers on both continents minimizing the need for traffic over the ocean.
--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com
My personal experience is
My personal experience is that placing the site closest to the target audience makes the site feel much quicker and so the visitor has a better experience..
As for hosts you really can't go far wrong with Linode.. Their servers are pretty quick and I have never had a problem.. Good control panel and automated backup service.. They have servers located across the world so you can launch a server through the control panel anywhere you need it and manage them all from the same place..
The thing you should really
The thing you should really consider is the legal implications (e.g. Safe Harbour agreement on hosting EU customer data in the USA). This is more relevant to e-commerce sites, but it is something to be aware of.
In terms of speed, the latency cross channel is not significant compared to the performance of the host itself.
My personal recommendation is to use a specialist Drupal host like Acquia or Pantheon. When you hit problems with server configuration, it will save you so much time if you are working with a host that knows Drupal. I've worked with Rackspace and UK Fast for a long time (as mentioned in previous posts) but when you hit a Drupal specific config or performance issue they can't really help you much. "It's in the app layer"
Richard
In terms of speed, the
Sorry but I have to disagree with this.. Even on simple pages the latency can make the site "feel" much slower.. If the latency difference is ~80-100ms and the page pulls down 30 objects that will add well over a second to the load time just in network latency.. Server performance would then be on top of that..
Agree that if you are not comfortable managing a server then the Drupal specific services are brilliant.. Just a little too expensive for lower level sites when compared to common VPS services.. In fairness though the Rackspace and Amazon services are pretty pricey as well..
It doesn't have to be expensive
Ah, but they don't have to be for lower needs sites. We offer Managed Drupal hosting for about the same cost as a customer purchasing their own production level VPS.
A good portion of the reason Rackspace, Amazon, et al. are expensive is because of their advertising costs. If you're willing to do the deep Googling yourself, you can find hosts like us who don't have the same overhead, and are hence, less expensive.
Best,
Michael
http://inet-design.com/
Drupal Managed Hosting includes Quarterly Updates, Data Migration, ...
SEO considerations
New to this group, hello everyone.
I've read that Google takes locality into consideration for search results and that that overseas IP addresses can be sometimes be a detrimental factor.
I'm not sure is this just SEO snake oil or a real issue. Can anybody comment?
@MrPaulDriver
As I understand it they use a
As I understand it they use a number of factors to determine locality, IP address being just one of them.. Although if locality is important to the sites purpose then having all the factors they use help makes sense..
That's right
There are a number of factors as ever to consider and take into account with SEO and location of server is one of them. A local estate agent who's site in a local European language would look a bit weird to be hosting his site in Japan or China for instance, this is less puniary if hosted in the US given the proliferation of globalised hosting services there.
One of the important factors is neighbourhood .i.e. is yours the only European site amongst millions of foreign ones. Also, it's worth taking into account what the client expects, most would expect a relatively local datacenter and if it is a European site, you should look to provide a jurisdiction which falls within European Data Protection Legislation as your European clients are bound to comply with this.
UK hosting is better if you
UK hosting is better if you have mostly traffic from United Kingdom. US hosting would be better solution for worldwide oriented site. UK hosted sites tend to rank better in google.co.uk and server response time will be faster for UK traffic.
If you choose US host I recommend you HostGator. You can use coupons 25LESSIN2012 (25% off) or 1CENT2012HG (1st moth for 1 cent).
From my background fiber and
From my background fiber and copper transmission lines have a loss associated with them That brings the speed below the speed of light. Plus distance even at the speed of light has a delay because of distance. Put you servers closer to your target customers. Oceanic transmission is the slowest paths because the equipment is so hard to upgrade.
I don't want to deal with money conversion as I am in the US. So my target is the US. My office is on Comcast cable and we have 40 or 50 hops to anywhere. My sites are hosted one hop off the central US fiber routes east and west and the Western border routes north and south.
Head Dragon Kid Stevens
Of Web-DrupalDesign .com
Several factors.
UK based servers are likely identified by Google as being "better" positioned to serve UK customers, so there's a potential SEO benefit, as someone alluded to. That's if your site is providing to a local community, ie targetted like "Drupal in Nottingham" (which is probably not worth it, frankly).
There are potential implications with the Data Protection Act here - you need to be mindful. Legislation is a bit flaky on whether storage of UK based private information can be legally stored abroad. There's not only the legal requirements of the UK to meet but you have to consider those of where the data is stored. Also, there is the transmission of the data to consider - the data may have to pass through other countries to get to its storage location, and is it safe there/in transit? A DP officer might be able to help but I never got a decent answer on this, despite some investigation. Safest bet is to stay local! :)
There's also the potential time factor as has rightly been pointed out. I have a US based shared hosted site (my own site, for some reason??) which is a lot slower than comparable options in the UK. It seems to be less of an issue than it used to though.
The other issue is support as has again been pointed out - the uptime guarantee is worth sh** if you can't get hold of a body when you have an urgent request! Whether that's reliability or a time zone thing, it's a big consideration.
I outlined a couple of options on the VPS providers list re Linode and Clustered, both of whom I can recommend and are widely used by Drupal devs. They both have UK data centres. Link to that: http://groups.drupal.org/node/208123#comment-688318
Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems / Follow me on Twitter! @NikLP
My experience
Hello, I have 10 years experience in the hosting industry and I should say that it doesn't matter much whether your server is located in the USA, UK or in India. The main things are the server hardware, server configuration, technical support professional qualities.
To my mind, the most stable hosts in the USA are Bluehost ( ,Hostgator and Fatcow). See more details on http://webhostingw.com
Larger Hosting
At our firm we have used Rackspace hosting and now use FireHost for dedicated servers and now VMs. Most of you mention larger scale hosting companies, which are all well known. What about that larger step into dedicated hosting solutions. Do you have any opinions when you want to be the seller rather than the buyer?
Latency accross the pond
I can quantify this. 10 years ago we had a fibre end to end link from the City to Wall Street. The latency was 70ms one way, I benchmarked this with a £60k ethernet analyser so know it was spot on. This was on ATM OC3 using OSPF routing no modern tech is any faster.
So each packet round trip is 140ms hence it will be slower. Stay near to base is the advice. A UK host for UK sites and US hosts for US sites, if you have a site that straddles the two look at ReindeerHosting in Greenland (only joking but seemed topical at this time of year).
Have Fun
Tim
@BobanZ hardware does not
@BobanZ hardware does not mean anything if you're network througoutput is not setup properly. You can have the best piece of hardware in the world but if it's not connected to a tier 1 network, and switches/routers are not optimized not to mention the OS environment then it won't do you any good all that fancy hardware.
It's always best to look at the network connectivity then look at hardware specs but as always not just the network that should be evaluated but also the hardware and that's another story in it's own :)
bending technology to fit businesses.
Translated into English from Network speak
You want the host server to be as close to the Internet backbone as possible.
You also want the switching and routing hardware to be non-blocking or possibly configurable to prioritise traffic on commonly used ports.
However whether the few ms's this will save is worth the extra expense of finding a hosting company that will a) tell you the route from host to backbone and the benchmarks for this (tier 1 being no guarantee of this) or b) tell you what switching hardware your hosting server is connected to may be is a moot point.
I recall switching a port from a top of the range Cisco 6509 to a dumb 3Com switch as the server was slow responding. There was an improvement but it was not worth the hassle of finding a place in the Rack to sit a non rackmountable switch.
The Moral: Paying more for better hardware or a host just off the backbone may not justify the hassle of an empty bank account. Ethernet is now a more or less homogenous commodity and has been since about 2004.
Tim (ex 3Com Professional Services btw)
Just out of interest
I ping and tracerouted to two hosts one hosted in the UK and one on Bluehost in the US
UK average ping time was 20ms
US average ping time was 171ms
Traceroute UK five hops
Traceroute US 20 hops.
Seems a no-brainer to me.