Cormac Moylan

I spent about eight or so months with EuroVPS and a further six months with 1and1 before moving my hosting back to Ireland with Blacknight Solutions.
The reasons I went with EuroVPS and 1and1 instead of a local company were purely bandwith and disk storage reasons. There is no hosting company in Ireland able to complete financially with the extra GBs of bandwith and storage you can get abroad. I have been involved for a while in a website which requires a lot of storage/bandwidth, but I’m cutting my ties with that site as I don’t have enough time to dedicate to make it operational. I was using their resources to host some of my sites in return for my assistance with their site. As a result I have moved to Blacknight.

I had no hesitation in moving to Blacknight. I have used them before during my time in college to host my projects. I have not one single bad thing to say about them. I have quite a few things to say about 1and1 and EuroVPS though..

1and1 are the pocket-pinchers of hosting. They don’t really care about the customer as they’re too busy counting their cash. They screwed me out of about €220 worth of extra bandwith. They never informed me that I had exceeded my bandwith limit or that I was close to exceeding my limit. It was only when I looked at my bi-monthly bill that I noticed the extra charges. I would expect any company which I was reciving a service from to inform me of any issues with my hosting. If they wanted to keep me as a happy customer all they had to do was to send me a email or a telephone call and I could have acted to prevent my bandwith indulgence. Instead I jumped ship and shacked up with EuroVPS.

I can’t really say anything too bad about EuroVPS. They offer a great package at a very reasonable cost. The only thing that I had a issue with was the cultural differences we had. EuroVPS are based in Amsterdam and although they can speak perfectly good English there were one or two instances where the support tickets could have been sorted out quicker due to them ‘not getting me’ and me ‘not getting them’.

You also need to devot a lot of time to the upkeep of your hosting package with EuroVPS as their hosting package is managed by yourself. The configuration of Plesk (their admin panel), the installataion of server side applications such as email clients and the patching of any vulnerabilities is put upon your shoulders. If you are technical and if you have the time to geek up on some manuals then you should be a happy camper with a VPS or a dedicated server.

I didn’t want the hassle of having to configure my hosting. That is one of the reasons I switched to Blacknight. The other big reason, is their excellent support. I have often received a clear and precise response from their technical team whenever an issue cropped up.

Blacknight are also located in Ireland, Carlow to be exact, and their servers are all based in Ireland and have Irish IP addresses. This is a bonus for SEO. If you’re hosting on the back of a local IP address then you will populate search queries from Google.ie when they have the ‘Search pages from Ireland’ button selected. Because I was hosting in Holland I noticed a lot of Dutch visitors on my blog. Hopefully I can turn those Dutch clicks into Irish clicks as a result of moving to Blacknight. I have no real reason to specfically want Dutch readers on my blog so why would I target them by hosting in their country?* If you want to rank for local results you should host locally. It’s as simple as that.

Another reason why I like hosting with Blacknight is the admin panel they use. I have used cPanel, Plesk and some crap inhouse thing that 1and1 threw together to manage my domains. Blacknight use DirectAdmin which in my opinion is by far the best and most simple to use admin panel for managing your domain. Within the DirectAdmin control panel, Blacknight have added two very nice plugins. One is for SEO and the other is for gathering information on your site’s statistics - AwStats. Also included is a easy to use manager for setting up Cron jobs.

I have recommended Blacknight to people whenever they ask about where they should host. I think I have maybe converted about seven or eight people in the past year. As far as I am aware they’re all happy.
* Please note that all Dutch people are more than welcome to read my blog. I’m not alienating you guys!

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