A couple of days ago I came across a post on Ken’s blog about the new Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann website. It seems that it’s now being talked about in other places.
I’m not a designer, so I won’t get into the entire debacle about whether Irish designers are “good enough”, though you won’t find me using non-Irish designers anytime soon…
What does rile me however are a couple of other things about the new site:
- It’s not hosted in Ireland
- The .ie and .com are aliased not redirects, so it’s splitting on the search results
Point 1 is directly related to point 2 from an SEO perspective.
From a business perspective I think it is deplorable that a state funded organisation would choose to host their online presence outside this country:
blacknight@siracusa:~$ geoiplookup www.comhaltas.com
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
Irish tax payers money funds organisations like Comhaltas and the GAA (who obviously don’t think Ireland is good enough for them either)
Back in the 1990s I would have understood why companies and organisations chose to host their websites outside Ireland. My first few sites were hosted in the USA in the late 1990s simply because there was so little choice available in the Irish market, and what was available was expensive and lacking in features (ie. no php, mysql or anything else).
It’s 2007. Hosting in Ireland has come a very long way, with most of the larger Irish hosting providers actually running their own networks etc.,
Just take a look at the membership list of INEX these days!
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