Robert1964

Hi, this is my first time here and I'm just starting out in the Website building game. I have 3 great ideas for websites and so I'm looking for a host.

What I'd appreciate your help and experience in is this:

If I go for a US host, and my audience is primarily UK based, are the response times going to be prohibitively long?

Will the response times be even longer if I use a UK company (www.1and1.co.uk) to register the 3 co.uk domains and then point them at the US webspace (www.hostgator.com is looking favourite)?

US hosting seems to give more for less. For example:

£27.01 (inc. VAT) in the UK
(http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/...top&__lf=Static)
gets you 10Gb Webspace and 80Gb Monthly traffic whereas:

£8.46 (no VAT to pay) in the US
http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml
gets you 10 Webspace and 100Gb Monthly traffic.

There are other differences of course but nothing life threatening.

What do you think?

Can you foresee any pitfalls?

What words of wisdom can you give me?

Thanks for listening,

Robert.

Fid

Hiya,

Well it kind of depends what you are doing. Most hosting companies in the UK (well what I have seen) have most of their servers in the US because as you said, it is much cheaper to buy hosting/servers from America. (Unless they are a very big company who can absorb the cost of hosting in the UK - and they will most likely advertise this).

Response times will be a bit slower connecting to America than the UK, but it will be so small you will hardly ever see the difference. The only time you might is if you are using the server for something such as gaming or something that requires real time data transfer, it will not be noticable.

So if you are going to have a website it should be absolutely fine.

I will also agree with you again how much cheaper it is from the US than UK, comparing two well known server companies you could get double the capacity/specifications in the US on a server than you could in the UK, especially on transfer (I've seen some offering 10gb a month, compared to all those 1000 gb's in the US).