At some stage in your journey to find a good host you will look at hosting overseas. Now there are a million different reasons for and against hosting abroad but the main one is usually price. One of the favourite places to host (if your not from there) is the USA. This is mainly because of the good exchange rates we get here in the UK which at the time of writing is around 65c per £1. The thing about hosting in America compared to here is its not link you are outsourcing to a third world country as in many ways America is the birth place of the internet and hence web hosting. Also many of the world’s top web-hosting companies are based in the USA, many hosting over a million customers, you would struggle to find a host of this size in the UK.
Another thing that people may be concerned about is the time difference as far as support goes. In the east cost of the US the time difference is not that big, around 5 hours. However this still is not really a factor with the bigger business hosts as they offer 24 hour support. Also the great thing about America is there really is no language barrier to speak off. This however could be an issue if you choose to host in some of the other big hosting countries like India although it does depend on the type if company you choose. At the same time you may be concerned that your host in the US (or even here for that matter) could be outsourcing their support somewhere else like India too. If this is the case i would definitely not recommend going with them. Not necessarily because Indian support is bad but i just don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have onsite support, its never as good no matter what people may claim.
I think theres also alot to be said for going with the bigger hosting companies in general as they have alot more to lose if things go wrong. With this in mind they are likely to put more into keeping their infrastructure up and running 24-7 as any outage is potentially going to affect thousands of customers. You also have to think about their track record and length of time in the business, some of these larger American business hosts have been in business for 10 years or more. I can tell you any internet business thats been going that long has to know what they are doing and how to keep customers happy!
As you can see i am a fan of offshore hosting for your business in general but it is the same as all things you have to look beyond the sales page of any business and work out if they are what they say. I know this can be hard in today’s market with everyone promising the earth. However i think there are a few points you can check automatically:
- How long have they been in business?
- Do they have an uptime guarantee?
- Lots of small print
- Do people talk about them on the web forums? Good or Bad?
So as promised that is my view on overseas hosting. More to come soon!
