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!
I think it’s a mis-characterisation to say that CCE is a state-funded agency. It’s primarily funded commercially, you can buy Comhaltas recordings on iTunes!
They also run events, music classes, charge for memberships, sponsorships and get substantial private donations. Although the long-time head of CCE is a Senator, and they get Arts council grants ocasionally, I think it’s a stretch to saw their a state-funded agency. They get government money in the form of grants, but then so does Google.
Michele’s point is well-put. Why host outside the Ireland when you hope to enhance your credibility for producing and maintaining authentic Irish content?
And if it’s a good thing to encourage Irish jobs, shouldn’t that goodness extend to hosting and web design decisions?
Colm
Google creates jobs in Ireland.
Bernie – exactly
Couldn’t agree more. I’d specifically steer clear of hosting abroad as the irish market is mature enough at this stage.
They should be using an Irish host, but I still don’t blame them for looking elsewhere for design and development work.
Eoghan
I don’t want to get into a debate about the design aspect 🙂
I’ll leave that to the designers
Michele
One thing we are not short of here is great design ability. Our “sales pitchability” is another story. I have always greatly admired the work from our irish designers some of whom have commented on the above in the creativeireland forum. I would suggest that designers make themselves and their portfolio known to Breandan Knowlton at Comhaltas for future work. For some, “sales” is a bad word, for Happy cog, it clearly is not…
As the guy behind the new Comhaltas site, maybe I can clarify a couple of misconceptions.
First, the site is hosted here in Ireland, specifically in a data centre in Tallaght, Dublin. I have a co-lo box there serving the video and audio streams, and a shared Linux box running the front-end.
Secondly, when I wrote the creative brief for the site, I went out to five firms for quotations, four in Ireland and one overseas (Happy Cog.) I included the Cogs based on their reputation and their publications, of course. But their proposal was the best that I received, both for their understanding of the brief and for their cost. Yep, the US firm ended up being more cost-effective, mostly because they started with a cheaper community-based CMS (ExpressionEngine from http://pmachine.com) rather than a bespoke CMS with attendant maintenance and licensing costs.
Comhaltas is an Irish-registered charity, and we do get some funding from Government (as do lots of other charities), so I actually had an obligation to go with the bid that was the best use of our Euros. And I’m sure that many Irish companies (web design shops and others) would be happy to bid for overseas business!
Anyway, I’m really proud of the site that we built, but I’ll leave the aesthetic questions to the designers. We spent a huge amount of thought on it, of course, with usability and accessibility foremost in our minds.
As far as .ie/.com splitting, I was trying to make sure that I was still servicing the many links to the comhaltas.com domain while “rebranding” to the more Irish .ie. If people think that I’d be better off with a redirect from .com to .ie, I’ll certainly try that out instead. Thoughts?
Breandán Knowlton has responded over at Ken’s blog and cleared-up a few things about the hosting:
http://www.themenace.com/blog/entry/?entry=21#comments
Breandán
Thanks for posting.
On the hosting side it looks very odd, as your dns is showing it pointing to US IPs that are not in Dublin:
blacknight@siracusa:~$ host http://www.comhaltas.com
http://www.comhaltas.com is an alias for comhaltas.com.
comhaltas.com has address 65.98.4.94
http://www.comhaltas.com is an alias for comhaltas.com.
http://www.comhaltas.com is an alias for comhaltas.com.
comhaltas.com mail is handled by 10 mail.comhaltas.com.
That IP (65.98.4.94) is ARIN which is in the US and couldn’t be in Dublin.
The same IP is reported for the .ie domain.
If you are doing some funky CNAME stuff in DNS you may want to have a look at it, as it is being reported as 100% US hosted.
With regard to the .ie vs .com – you won’t lose anything by doing a graceful 301 redirect from the second domain to the first, but if you don’t you will end up with both domains being indexed partially which will make a lovely mess of your SEO efforts
Regards
Michele
Thanks for that, Michele. I gotta say, SEO is something I know very little about — I don’t think that they covered search engines in music school. 🙂 I’ll set up a redirect from .com to .ie – it’s silly to be indexed twice.
My DNS setup is pretty straightforward, but you’ll notice the following from whois:
FortressITX FORTRESSITX (NET-65-98-0-0-1)
65.98.0.0 – 65.98.127.255
Pegasus Web Technologies TRANSNEXIS-HOSTING (NET-65-98-4-88-1)
65.98.4.88 – 65.98.4.95
MyHost.ie TRANSNEXIS-HOSTING-MYHOST-IE (NET-65-98-4-88-2)
65.98.4.88 – 65.98.4.95
The geo-locator shows the USA based on the FortressITX entry, but my actual IP block is subrogated via MyHost.ie, which is a firm run out of Dublin. If you talk to the owner (Martin) on the phone, you’ll quickly hear whether we’re Irish hosted or not!
Oh, and any comments on the site itself are, of course, welcome.
Cheers,
// Breandán
Breandán
It’s a US IP. It’s NOT an Irish IP.
It would be pretty much impossible to put that IP in Dublin.
Myhost.ie maybe an Irish company but that IP isn’t
Michele
Michele,
Yes, the server for the front-end of the site is in the US, though (as you say) I’m hosting it with an Irish firm, MyHost.ie. Netcraft would call this an Irish site:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.comhaltas.com
Media.comhaltas.ie (which serves all the heavy-duty content) is definitely in Dublin, as I bolted it into the rack myself. 🙂
Cheers,
Breandán
Breandán
So, as I said orginally, the site is hosted in the US.
Which means that you are basically supporting US jobs, not Irish ones.
There are plenty of Irish hosting companies, including the one where you have your media server, that are based in this country and supporting the local economy.
Michele
Michele, if I’m paying an Irish firm to host my website, surely that’s the important thing? If Martin finds it more economical to sub-contract the physical management of his servers, that might say some interesting things about the Irish economy, but doesn’t mean that I’m not supporting Irish jobs.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions on the domain names – I shall definitely take them on board. Thanks again!
Breandán
I think you’re missing the main points.
Have a read of this:
http://blog.moybella.net/2007/03/06/gaa-supporting-local-business/
It’s not about your site, but illustrates a very important point
Michele
Breandán,
I don’t know what NetCraft is going by, but every other service I’ve checked knows that the server is in the USA, including the MaxMinds GeoIP database. I don’t know what market you’re targeting, but if it’s an Irish market, the server a long way away
From Ireland, traffic to comhaltas.com is currently going via London to New York. Not as bad as the GAA by a long shot, but it still doesn’t exactly seem local.
Niall.
Well, we do get more traffic from the USA, as it happens, with Ireland a close second. 🙂 You could argue that I’m getting the worst of both worlds: by having servers in different places, I’m guaranteeing that some content will be coming from Ireland and some from the States. The fact that it functions relatively smoothly seems to indicate the physical location doesn’t matter so much these days. On the other hand, I have redundant versions of most content backed up in both places, and in an emergency I could switch entirely to one or the other.
But my point was that we’re employing an Irish webhost company which happens to have some hardware here and some in the USA. So we’re still supporting the Irish economy, and it’s an Irish cheque in Euros that I write every month to a business based in my home town. The economics of the data centre market happen to mean that it’s cheaper for our hosting provider to have some hardware managed from the USA, which is (I think, anyway) a very interesting thing, but not quite the same thing as sending our business overseas.
Michele,
I added the 301 redirect to http://comhaltas.ie, so perhaps Google will be happier. Thanks for the advice.
Cheers,
Breandán
Speaking as an Irish Taxpayer, I’d want the state funded agencies to use the best / most cost effective services available, no matter where they were located.
Even the ‘Guaranteed Irish’ campaign (remember them?) only recommended buying Irish if the local service *was as good as the import*.
I think in the end, Brendán has shown that he chose cost efficiency, recognised designers(HappyCog) and IRISH hosting. (The fact that he physically put the server in an Irish datacenter himself is enough for me)
The fact is that he chose an Irish hosting company, and it is _their_ responsibility to either have their servers in Ireland where you would expect or make sure the customer knows their hosting is not actually being provided from Ireland.
I think a lot of people have been “once bitten twice shy” of the Irish web hositng industry. Having worked in web design for over 10 years I can say that I’ve definitely had bad experiences with Irish hosting companies. Things have changed for the better but there is still a lot of cowboys in this industry.
I think Breandán made a good considered choice when he went with Happy Cog. Like it or not Irish web designers like every other web designers are competing globally.
Paul – that campaign seems to still be going. I had considered joining it, but it doesn’t seem to have as much PR these days, which is a pity
Liam – there’s a lot of cowboys in hosting. Period 🙂
From a scientific survey (sample size =1) I’d advise against going the ‘Guaranteed Irish’ route.
For some reason it reminds me of Green copy books , Smelly Crisps and the Cheap Fiat 128’s that came into Ireland flat packed and then were assembled here before rusting to bits.
Paul
Paul
That’s down to the way it’s marketed. If they changed the marketing strategy (or even introduced one) it would / could be quite different from a perception point of view
M
Michele,
Gap in the market for you there then 🙂
Paul
Hi
I’m fascinated with the distinction being made between US jobs and Irish jobs, on the assumption that Irish companies or organisations, in receipt of grant aid or supports from the state/ tax payers should support Irish jobs in preference to US jobs because its well patriotic or something…
This smacks of pure protectionism / parochialism and one imagines that choosing an Irish supplier over another purely on that basis would be an inappropriate and frankly illegal use of said tax payers money.
Can you imagine what would happen if US companies and organisations adopted a US only policy!
Global economic meltdown.
Bottom line, we should be able to compete on talent alone and if it is a very price sensitive commodity type market, look to build non-price focused augmentations into the product / service design.
FWIW…