Hosting in the UK - recommendations and advice please

RapidWeaver Classic General
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I have used Rapidweaver virtually since its inception and always used shared hosting with 1&1 in two contracts. (Approx 30 customer websites per contract). Personally for me 1&1 have gone downhill lately and for some reason I cannot FTP access/upload to one of my contracts containing 30 customer websites and for 48hrs 1&1 have been unable to fix the issue. The point I’m getting to is that I think its time to change and would welcome anyones recommendations for a good UK Host (Shared or dedicated). I know a lot of RW users swear by Chillidog Hosting so another question is should I host only on UK based servers? or will it make no difference using a hosting company with servers based outside the UK?.. Thanks in advance. Andy

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I’ve never answered email with one eye open… never happens… I swear :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

@friscan
I have a lot of users based in the UK, Europe, and even some in Asia. These users have never complained :slight_smile: Some people think that, for SEO, you need to have your site hosted in the same region but this is simply not true. Search engines are smart enough to know a .co.uk domain, for instance, talking about English politics (for example) ranks higher on google.co.uk than google.com. Search Engines are big business. Give them a little benefit of the doubt. Sorry, had to rant :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyways, I’m happy to have you onboard. If you decide on Chillidog, simply sign up and I’ll help you get started. I migrate new user’s sites, by hand, for free to make the process as easy and stress free as possible. Just let me know :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Greg

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Thanks Greg and you have answered some of my fears. I also like your offer to help migrate the domains/websites but one question every customer fears when I mention it is ‘what will happen to my emails’?. Most of my customer email accounts are set up as IMAP and would they loose any emails during migration?..
Thanks Andy

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Wait for next weekend before you make a decision. Depending on whether UK leaves the EU, there will be implications depending on where your clients sit. I, for example, would not move any EU client to UK hosting at the moment. That, of course, depends on which data (in addition to the casual website-data) you are using. As soon as this is stuff that goes into the direction of personal data or anything that is protected by EU data protection laws: Be cautious…http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-dataprotection-idUSKCN0YW1XW

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Email migration works like this:

  1. Create the same accounts on the new host
  2. Change the name servers (typically it takes 48hrs to fully propagate)
  3. Migrate emails via IMAP from the old hold to the new host.

This will mean that no email is lost and no new email is missed during the transition. :slight_smile:

-Greg

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I’ve been with UK2 and Idaq, both UK companies, for decades and I’m pretty happy with both. However, if I were starting from scratch I’d probably go with Chillidog. And they have the best logo in the business!

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I use Futurehosting who don’t do shared hosting but you can get an excellent deal on a fully managed VPS and choose their UK data centre if you wish. I’ve been there for a few years now and cannot really fault them.

For speed you want your server to be close to your site visitors as a general rule. I’ve heard it can affect SEO as well but I find that harder to believe these days.

With reference to the EU comment above if you want the strictest data protection in this era go to Switzerland and they are outside the EU…

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