Looking for a good international web host

    Hey everyone,

    I've been using 1and1 for over 5 years now, but I keep hitting a wall each time I move out of a country. 1and1 requires to be paid using a card issued in the same country as the country the account originates from (they have a different company as part of a holding in each country they operate in)

    So every single time, I have to cancel my existing account and register a new one in the country I move to. Huge pain in the ass.

    This time around, my account in Germany needs to be renewed in the coming days, but of course I cancelled my card there. So it will be cancelled. But instead of signing up in France only to have to redo everything once more when I move to Boston later this year; I'd very much like to get a new web host that is good AND will allow for bills to be paid in multiple countries.

    Anyone using such a web host?

    Pretty much every web host I've ever used has allowed international billing — generally as long as you have a VISA (or just as often PayPal) you're good. Off the top of my head you can try EuroVPS or UK2 for European hosting, but really there's loads and those aren't necessarily the cheapest/best (although EuroVPS's web hosting is based on a very powerful cloud so is going to guarantee excellent performance).

    I use godaddy and they accept many methods of payment, inc paypal. No problems with them in over 4 years, any queries answered in a few hours max via email or within minutes by (local) phone number.

    If any of you are still using GoDaddy, please stop. They introduced a new policy called Selective DNS Blackout, which means that they will without warning block connections from certain DNS servers, because they're shitty servers apparently can't handle all requests.

    Read more here:

    http://%7boption%7d

    Besides that Godaddy has always been the most evil web host/registrar, with loads of retarded policies and shady business practices. I had a couple o domains registered with them a few years ago and went through hell when I wanted to transfer them to another service (which with any other registrar is has simple as getting the transfer code).

    Also their website is made so that you sign up for stuff that you don't need/want without you even realizing, so if you do have to use their services read everything twice and be very careful on what options you choose.

    But If do have a choice and if you care please don't support them just because of boobs.

    About decent hosts, since i have to use Windows servers i use SoftsysHosting.com, they provide dedicated and shared hosting, VPS and cloud backup servers. Their pricing plans are really simple, with no hidden costs, and really cheap considering what you get and the quality of their service. They have their own Datacenters (unlike most hosting companies that use rented servers) located in Denver and Chicago, and the best uptime I've seen.

    Their shared hosting plans start at 42$/Year with 1Gb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth, and go all the way up to 20Gb of disk space and 200Gb of bandwidth for 400$/year. If you need more then that you can choose one of their VPS plans which are the best I've seen so far (the cheaper one costs 35$ a month for 30Gb/300Gb), or Dedicated servers (which tbh are a bit expensive...).

    Yeah, GoDaddy are dickheads. I have some domains with them that I haven't transferred away yet out of convenience more than anything, but every time I renew they routinely try and cram a load of extras onto my purchase, make me believe I'm saving (ie: paying the same as everywhere else) by doing it early, etc. Just very deceptive and sub-par service.

    My advice having used a huge number of web hosts (50+) on each end of the market during my time as a web designer is to forget about bandwidth because once you get above 50–100GB it might as well just say 'infinite'. At that point hosts will stop limiting you by bandwidth, instead focusing on your CPU and RAM use. If your site is actually using 100s of GBs of bandwidth then they'll generally either shift you to a much slower server where all the high-use sites go, or they'll cut you off altogether citing excessive resource usage.

    Instead, concentrate on things like the locality (European visitors = European host) and performance of the host in question. I generally install a blank WordPress on a web host I use to see how it measures, and I've seen it range from 1–5 seconds to process a page (Dreamhost) to 0.2–0.8 seconds (EuroVPS, Linode). Generally the very popular hosts that throw endless bandwidth at you like Dreamhost, HostGator, Bluehost, etc will be very restrictive when it comes to the actual performance of your sites because they pile so many people on each server to cut costs. The moment your site gets Dugg or featured on a large site like Kotaku you might as well forget about it staying up.

    Often you'll find that hosts that are reasonably generous with bandwidth but not extravagently so are optimal. For example if a host has a 50GB, 200GB, and 500GB plan you'll often find they don't overload the servers for each level and you'll generally get better server performance. Whereas if you use a host that gives you 1,000,000GB on even the lowest plan the chances are they'll all perform like ass and there's no real degree of performance difference between them. A well-managed and high-performance host simply won't give out crazy amounts of bandwidth because it's unsustainable without compromising elsewhere.

    Of course if all you want is somewhere to dump files these hosts can be rather reasonable, but if you're putting together a serious site for a serious project forget about bandwidth because the chances are you'll never hit the limit. If you do have large files like videos and music you're better off using dedicated hosts like YouTube for those things anyway as you can't compete with their network/performance and it's better for social marketing. Instead look for hosts that are known to deliver fast performance and don't overcrowd their servers.

    With all that said you can get lucky. I once had a site Dugg on Dreamhost and remarkably it stayed up, but it did take 30–90 seconds to load the pages and who knows how many visitors I lost as a result. I then got featured on a whole bunch of gaming sites simultaneously (Shacknews, Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid) at a later date but this time with Media Temple — you wouldn't even know anything was happening despite the traffic being roughly equivalent (40GB for a HTML page and some images in the space of an hour or so).

    I settled for Softsys Hosting given my upcoming move to the east coast. No hassle so far, everything went very smoothly and my website is back up now

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login