I’ve been with lcn.com for over a decade now and they’ve been very good.
95% of my traffic comes from the UK and they are a UK company with servers here.
Question to anyone (I don’t know much about servers) does it make much difference where the servers are located? I guess there are other factors involved but I’ve often wondered about this.
Question to anyone (I don’t know much about servers) does it make much difference where the servers are located?
In what sense?
Is it generally better to have your website hosted on a server in the country where the vast majority of your visitors come from (in my case the UK)?
In my case it’s an Apache HTTP Server with Linux Multi Domain Hosting.
I’m referring to general speed / response times. Not customer service.
In my opinion, not a ton if you have a good backbone (server, network infrastructure, etc.). You can see the performance of various servers from different locales on my status page. Most response times are ~100ms. Compared to the rest of the content on a page, this can be small. Best first tip is to optimize your images 
-Greg
Yes - local servers may help with speed and from a GDPR perspective, EU websites should ideally be served out of the EU as I understand it. This aside, it’s not a bad idea to have a host with local language support and local time zone. As @barchard says, speed hits are very minimal globally if the infrastructure is good: nevertheless my experience suggests local makes more sense unless there is some particular reason to host elsewhere.
My small agency has had a dedicated cloud server running approx 75 RW and 30 Wordpress sites with Clook in the UK for years, and their support response times are virtually always < 2 minutes - 24/7. Uptime is virtually 100%. They also offer regular shared hosting.
No knowledge of RW to speak of - although to me that is way down the list of important things. Most important is that the environment is suitable and support is good.
If any UK weavers would like to share our agency hosting and have a friendly RW person on hand, I’d be happy to chat - DM me. We can offer WordPress assistance also. However, we’re not a hosting outfit.
J’utilse les services de A2HOSTINGS.
Aucun probleme. Tres bonne reactivité s’ il y a un probleme.Savent se mettre à la portée des utilisateurs.
Bref, a recommander.
Rapidweaver à jour sur Macbook air M1 sous monterey
Just changed from godaddy to Chillidog! So glad I did. They have been extremely helpful in every aspect of the change over. THANKS Chillidog!
I have tried many over the years. I settled on Hostmonster several years ago. It was a great move for me. I have never like to use Rapidweaver’s built-in FTP support. A big reason is I read of all the problems other have with it. I prefer a program that is designed for that function only.
Hostmonster has 24 hour phone service. They are there anytime I’ve needed them. I have never had to wait more than a minute. They have a set it and forget service for me. They also work with you on pricing if you sign up for a few years at a clip.
I think it is unfair to attack any service with blanket statements. There is a reason the EIG group has so many large hosting names. They must be doing something right.
I wear all hats in my company. When I am working on my website I can’t just come back in a few hours to see how to fix something. For me, a live person is always the best. That being said I consider myself no expert on this topic. I can only speak to my personal experience.
A fun fact… invest a couple of hours in your Google Business page. You will be surprised at how much more local business you get… mine quadrupled.
I am using my website more as a secondary tool… not because I wanted it that way, because that is the way it turned out.
A2 or DreamHost. “Rapidweaver hosting” isn’t really a thing…
Maybe it shouldn’t be but it apparently is for some hosting services. When their people look at the RW file structure they have difficulties helping. They have said to me things like I need to contact the RW crew to fix the issue because they are not trained in RW. Since I am not sure what RW is doing that they find strange, I have no way to continue the discussion or get help.
Not necessarily. It is possible to gather large sums of money from investors and dominate, even monopolize an industry. By “economizing”, i.e reducing services or transferring compensation from staff to stockholders, it is possible to create a new lower standard of service and normalize that lower standard of service throughout an industry. This kind of things happens in our [American] form of capitalism quite often.
That said, I, [and apparently many others] have had enough bad experiences with the EIG group that we are compelled to look elsewhere. If you have not had a bad experience, good on you. But as for me, I am looking outside of EIG.
BTW, thanks everyone for the contributions to this discussion.
Well I’ve never known a web host to be responsible for or helpful with the website itself ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not true. Chillidog is the official hosting partner for Realmac. And we’ve got over a decade working with RapidWeaver and Stacks.
Example; A website is uploaded. It is working as intended/expected. Then one day, out of the blue, it is not. Who would you say is “responsible” for that? To whom do you turn to fix it?
Yes I know you work with RW and make stacks. Personally I haven’t experienced that as a factor when it comes to your web hosting.
The point I’m making is when it comes to web hosting I’m not aware of anything that is Rapidweaver specific. RW outputs a bunch of HTML files which could be generated by anything. I’ve never experienced a web host which troubleshoots HTML for you.
Therefore I’d be prioritising value for money, speed, and reliability.
Too open-ended that question I think – depends on the issue, doesn’t it? You’d have to sleuth out who is responsible for the fix. If it’s server issues you’d go the web host, if they’ve updated something which breaks some code in a stack you’d have to go to the stack developer, if it’s a Wordpress issue you’d go to your Wordpress dev, etc. etc.
Chilidog without question!