Open Letter To Adrian Weckler – editor Computers in Business – Sunday Business Post

I was going to send this Mr Weckler directly, but I realised that it stood little chance of being published, so I’m putting it here instead.
Sir
I am writing in my capacity as MD of an Irish hosting company with regard to your most recent editorial “Cut your web-hosting costs with a little DIY”.
Your article’s bottom line was “don’t buy Irish”, however as a journalist it would be expected that any such message would have been backed up by proper research. It was not.
Although you seem to think that Irish business is paying “too much” you don’t seem to have addressed what they actually want or need.
Irish hosting companies, like us, have made a conscious decision to invest in the Irish market and to support the Irish economy. From the clients’ perspective this brings a number of clear advantages, such as being able to access local customer support during Irish office hours. The majority of the cheap US hosts do not offer 24/7 support, so Irish clientele will suffer from the time difference. If you have an issue with email at 9am IST, then you could be waiting until 3pm IST to get a response from a US company, as they are generally between 6 and 8 hours behind Ireland. Although this may not be an issue for some of the more “tech savvy” clients the majority of Irish SMEs do not fit into that category and require technical assistance on a regular basis.
Users find websites by using search engines. If a domain (site) is hosted in the US it will not be listed by Google as being a “site from Ireland”.
If the site’s primary market is Ireland, it will lose customers.
Many of the lower end US hosters are resellers of resellers of resellers.
They typically have no technical competence. One of the issues that many Irish clients face is the total lack of competency shown by many of the smaller US companies. The most frequent problem is that the client’s domain is not properly setup in the DNS. This results in loss of mail, and a website not being found.
Others pursue highly disreputable domain registration practices. It is not unusual to find that some of these “bottomfeeders” have registered the client’s domain in their own name. Consequently the client only finds out that they have no domain when they try to move hosts
In your article you stated categorically that there was “no advantage in web-hosting just because the company happens to be Irish”. The opposite is the case. We believe that the client is entitled to a decent level of customer support and technical support. Our staff spend more time dealing with technical support and customer service queries than anything else between 9am and 6pm (Irish office hours).
You cited Yahoo’s small business hosting package as an example, but you may not have examined it in any detail. Although they offer 2GB of disk space they do not offer any server-side scripting, so even a simple feedback form would not be supported by that package. From a practical point of view no Irish SME would realistically need that amount of disk space unless they were using it for storing illegal software. The US market is completely saturated with resellers of resellers of resellers all fighting it out over 2 cents, which leads to the hosting plans with the crazy amounts of disk space and unrealistic amounts of bandwidth on offer. Their entire business model is based on overselling their capacity by 1000% or more. If their clients actually made use of their allocation Yahoo et al would not be able to offer those kind of prices for very long.
If you wish to write something in ‘defence’ of the Irish consumer and to attack Irish businesses, you should try basing it on facts.
Did you actually speak to anybody in a “cost-conscious” small company? Did you contact any of the “big” Irish webhosting companies? Did you actually do any research at all?
Regards