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My 5 domains are hosted on an unreliable free webhost. The sites are regularly down for hours at a time and the support is non existent. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much as it is free after all. However, im a little fed up with my email disappearing for hours on end and my websites vanishing into thin air. Does anyone out there us a free/ reasonably priced hosting provider? I don't need much per domain, about 100mb of storage, about 1GB bandwidth, php, preferably Fantastico for ease of installation and 1 sql database per domain. SMTP would be good, but I only really need it on one domain, so long as I can set up re- directs on the others.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Mark
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Hi, have a look at Blackfoot, that's who I'm using for the website we are developing, on the recommendation of my brother, who does websites for a living. So far we've not had any problems. It's not free but it is cheap.
http://www.blackfoot.co.uk/
Jacqui
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Jacqui
http://relocatetospain.blogspot.com our adventure from deciding to move to Spain to being here and moving back to the UK.
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I've used 123-reg for over 5 years and had no problems whatsoever.
Not free though.
Laury
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Laury
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Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I shall start having a look later in the week.
Mark
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I finally found a new host , eukhost, which is well priced and allows me to put all of my domains on the one account. They are all Joomla based accounts, so the service they offer of moving your site across is great as re- installs can be a pain sometimes to move across. I bought the hosting last night, made some mistakes in the transfer process which meant customer service couldn't do anything until 7am this morning and by 10am it was up and running. I have just changed the nameservers, so hopefully by tomorrow it should be showing on the new host  . The temporary url they have provided loads much quicker than my other one which was across the pond, so hopefully visitors may want to stay a bit longer (and I may get some bookings  )
Mark
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So, being the SEO guru Justin, why does it make a difference to Google that my new host has servers in the UK?
Mark
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Unlike the (easy) old days, the search results today are based on the location of the where the person is searching from.
For example, if you are in the UK and want to find the best Pizza restaurants, you don't want to be presented with a list of US pizza places when searching on Google. You want UK ones.
Search results today are therefore geo-targeted so that you are always presented with the results most relevant to you and where you are.
It really DOES make a big difference in the rankings.
It also helps to submit a sitemap to Google webmaster tools and you can actually tell Google what country you are targeting there.
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Schools in Spain Guide | The Expat Files | Learn Spanish | Earn a living in Spain
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Thanks for that Justin. So that puts us at a disadvantage for mainlnd Europe then? That said, I currently have good rankings on Yahoo but not so much on Google, maybe I ought to look at google.com to see if it ranks? The site is primarily for English speakers, but there is a small amount of content for French, Spanish (and soon Italian), so how is the best way to go about that then?
Mar
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Mark, Google is all about links and if your site is new and in a competitive field then you need to get lots of optimised links pointing to your site and it can take a few months to get it ranking well.
Searching for "holiday almeria" Google brings up over 4 millions results, which means it is quite competitive. With a niche site you should be able to get it to rank well but it's a bit of effort.
To be honest, there are many "long tail" phrases that you should be using too, which you can do by creating pages within your site for those phrases.
In terms of different languages, unfortunately your site has a couple of issues. Firstly, although the text on the page changes, the menu remains in English. This doesn't work well with Google as it assumed that if, for example, a French speaker lands on your French page, they won't know what to do next as everything else in is English.
You are better to copy the whole site over in another language (just use the google language translator to do this, it's good enough for ranking purposes) and place each language alternative under a folder such as "www.mysite.co.uk/francais". Also, when you link to each folder make sure that the text in the link is in the language of that folder.
There is lots you can do, it just depends how much time you want to spend on it!
Justin
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Schools in Spain Guide | The Expat Files | Learn Spanish | Earn a living in Spain
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You are better to copy the whole site over in another language (just use the google language translator to do this, it's good enough for ranking purposes) and place each language alternative under a folder such as "www.mysite.co.uk/francais". Also, when you link to each folder make sure that the text in the link is in the language of that folder.
Ahh, there's method in my madness there Justin. Those pages are there primarily as landing pages from a web based advert. The foreigners I have had visit, either deal directly with my agent or they correspond in English. It is my token gesture to try and make them feel a bit more at home . I don't like the Google translator as it is too literal with the wording. Try translating a page from English to Spanish to English again and it makes very little sense!
I have noticed that there are a lot of sites on Google with keywords that I use, I don't even feature in the first 15 pages which isn't particularly good  , although my old page is starting to show in the ranks now and has a Page Rank of 2. Funnily enough Yahoo shows many of my pages in the first 10 on a search. I'm getting there slowly, I don't ever expect to be up there with the likes of the rental companies, but word of mouth should help get it around.
Thanks for your input, it is interesting to learn.
Mark
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I see you have a hosting provide already but here is my 2 cents worth. I have been using Godaddy and it has been OK, sometimes I notice some slowness, perhaps because there are so many peopl eusing Godaddy. I have heard good things though about SiteGround. I will be staying where I am though as I have a number of domains and all on the one web hosting. So much easier to leave it all as it is.
If you are going into podcasting the get an account at libsyn is my recommendation there.
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David Allen Wizardgold - Artist, Writer, Photographer and video maker.
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