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
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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Well said!
It’s too often said that the Irish hosting market is too expensive for the ‘cost conscious SME’. In fact, with both money exiting the economy and the lost time and productivity caused by the mismatch in support windows I’d go so far as to say that hosting locally with the likes of blacknight / hosting365 / other local companies is worth “double the difference” if not considerably more if and when things go wrong.
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“Computing isn’t a science – it’s closer to a black art.” – Anon
Good reply. Was quite disgusted to read his article. Would never even consider choosing hosting in the States over Irish hosting. There’s really no comparrison. Another case of bigger != better!
I’m happy with using the option where I support an Irish company, using Irish servers and have the support I need when I need it. I don’t see why anybody would complain about paying for a quality service.
Earlier this year I made a comparison between Web Hosting in Ireland and on the Isle of Man. Without going into details, the quote I received from the Isle of Man was better, not only was the price lower but I was being offered more features than if through Ireland. The conclusion is that Ireland is expensive from domain registration to hosting and I am glad that Adrian Weckler has raised this issue. Ireland is in danger of falling behind in the Internet, places like the Isle of Man, Estonia, Slovenia, Cyprus can offer a better deal.
Weckler hasn’t a clue about webhosting business or,indeed, how the internet works. As for getting a quote from the Isle Of Man or any other country – fine save a few euros. But if you want to sell anything to the Irish market you are in trouble. Most people find sites by search engines and search engines will interpret an Isle of Man site as being an IOM/UK site rather than being an Irish site. So what you saved in hosting your site in the IOM will cost you dearly if you are a serious business.
Weckler is evidently ignorant about the internet. Relying on the opinion of such a clueless individual is bad at the best of times. If you are a business man then you would be a fool to treat the ignorance of Weckler and people like him as fact.
Born In Dublin, i live outside of Ireland – the quotes about bad service from US companies/bad service because of time differences etc are unfair – we’ve used US companies for years – 24/7 care at about 30% of the Irish price – and talking about 24/7, supporting local economy etc, with the increibly low penetration of internet access in Ireland, i doubt if internet B2B/B2C business generated solely from internet (ie NOT looking at a website after a telephone enquiry but ordering/contact solely from website) is more than a few million euro
Freddi
Thank you for your comments, however I think you missed the point entirely.
I am not talking about internet only business. I am talking about the small company down the road that has email and a brochure site. I am talking about people with little or no technical knowledge. I am talking about the people who ring us up to “register” an email address
As a Dublineer who legged it to Silicon valley to escape Telcom Eireann marketing ISDN as new technology in the 90’s to get decent broadband to run my business – I can attest to the rubbish being spoken of here – I own a Californian ISP, I can buy high quality bandwidth that will ping Ireland faster than most Irish ISPs! And I can offer a better product to Ireland! And for a mere $4.99 I have an Irish phone number based on VoIP technology. When it comes to internet connectivity Ireland is in the stoneage! I get home ever few months, and it’s still BACKWARDS compared to the rest of the world – amazing considering the sucess of the Irish Software Industry! An Post must get a lot of business posting CDs!
Ireland Online is an Oxymoron.
Your comment about not coming up “pages in ireland” search is rubbish Michelle. Im hosted in europe and in the states and i’m number 1 in google for “pages in ireland” and my most competitive searches. You think google expects you to host in your own country always? Geolocation is only a small part of their algorithm and as the saying goes “content is king”. Just as well you didnt send it in in case this guy published it – you would have been making some seriously wrong statements. The IEDR’s website saying you rank higher for having an IE domain name is also nonsense
Root_kit :
1 – Please spell my name correctly.
2 – You may be an exception. Most SEO professionals would agree with me.
Cian – I won’t disagree with you about Ireland’s broadband infrastructure being laughable, however I would love to see a US ISP capable of giving a better ping to this server than an Irish ISP
IEDR.. hmm have the still sorted out it’s legality – specifically the split from UCD.. I’m out of touch on that little quango. I wrote off IEDR a long time ago as a mismanaged, corrupt, joke.
Michele, I have some servers in California and some with in Texas – here’s the TX stat. 64 bytes from palermo.mneylon.com (81.17.240.197): icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=131 ms
That’s good enough for even a game like BF2.
Cian
Cian
131 ms ping is pretty dire. Most servers I play on have pings of between 35 and 70 ms and get very laggy when there are any players with pings over 100 milliseconds.
Yep – I was expecting 70 or so, I’ll see what’s up. Any game servers I operate, I generally set default autokick >150.
Cian
I wouldn’t expect to find a US gameserver with good enough pings to play from here unless both my dsl provider and the US provider were using the same IP backhaul.. even then it probably wouldn’t be as playable as a European server 🙂
ping this: (My old BF2 server in San Jose) 216.237.118.163. But yes – generally you are right – Europeans tend to be too high. But back to hosting… Except in the realm of streaming DV, 150 hacks it – and thus opens up access to the bulk houses like EV. But where I find the big differences are cost, speed, install time and availability of domestic broadband. I got a quote for 400 (all in) for T1 to a house in the Santa Cruz mountains here. DSL speeds offered here just don’t compare (Eircom even twist the definition of the word Broadband which is >1M), cable is now 8M/768k out. As an ISP I know you’ll appreciate the outbound speed when working on remote servers.
How the internet ever got off the ground amazes me – yoinks ago I got runner up the once good Spiders – then I got the hell out of dodge.. Not that I like the US – but I do like their $$$. I never even got around to chasing down the Irish market… too much market here, and anyway I’m got other commitments so I’m not bothered with the hosting for now. But the bottom line, I fail to see why there’s any advantage in hosting in Ireland for most SMEs – I wish there was, believe me. Anyone who has succeed in running a web based business from Ireland has truly beaten the odds and worked hard for it… I won’t even start on Irish credit card merchant accounts.. or not.
I’ve always summarized the differences with a gross simplification. Cell phones are cheap, easy to get, and high tech in Europe. In the US they are a rip off, pay for incoming, and very old technology. Domestic internet access is the converse.