aidanf.net

Damien Mulley (via twitter) and Michele Neylon both pointed to a thread on boards about political parties in Ireland not using Irish web hosts.

This site is hosted on Site5, an American hosting company. The last time I moved hosts I checked a lot of different providers and there was a large difference in the value offered by Irish hosts compared to that offered by American hosts.

I had a quick look at Site5 and Blacknight sites to see if this was still the case. I haven’t used Blacknight but they have a good reputation and are one of the best known Irish hosting providers. I compared Site5’s shared plan with Blacknight’s basic hosting plan. These two plans are similarly priced so lets compare them on what they offer.

So there is still a difference in what you get for each plan today. You could argue that the Site5 limits are unrealistically high because they know that most people using shared hosting will never reach them. However the major point for me in choosing one of these plans would be the low number of databases and the lowish limit on monthly bandwidth.

Another argument might be that you would get better service from an Irish host. I haven’t had any major service problems with Site5 - they have always gotten back to me within a couple of hours and they have 24/7 support. The server performance has also been good - I’ve been on digg frontpage and del.icio.us/popular without having any problems.

The main disadvantages to being on an American host are

1. not being included in Googles country-specific search for Ireland and
2. slightly longer ping times from Ireland (but most of my hits come from outside Ireland)

All other things being equal, I would have preferred to use an Irish-based host to get into the Google Ireland index but the difference in what’s available on similarly priced plans is too much.