Re: FN-FORUM: hosting for the UK?

date posted 20th January 2008 13:51

> You are absolutely right that support must be contactable within business
> hours - provided this is done, does it matter where the servers are?

To a small extent, yes.

Latency to US servers from the UK will be a little more than to UK servers.
Potentially more worryingly, US-based servers will be covered by US law,
including privacy laws.
Many belive that UK-based servers feature higher in UK-biased search
engine results (e.g. Google.co.uk), which would make sense.
Software support is one consideration, but sometimes hardware changes are
needed in an emergency. At times like that the timezone where the server
is physically located can be quite important.

I run my own servers, and have a few sites run by others on them. In
emergencies I can be contacted at any time, and, having remote power and
serial consoles, I can usually fix any problem that doesn't require
hardware changes myself. My most-important sites are now on a large VPS
from clustered.net, who provide excellent 24/7 support, usually responding
within a few minutes to any messages :) and their hardware is yummy -
redundant everything!

You only find out how good your host is when things go wrong, especially
hardware problems.

Anthony
--
www.fonant.com - Quality web sites