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This blog is now brought to you from an ex-MoD fallout bunker

Image credit: Krystal Hosting

That’s right. No kidding.

I have just completed an enormous overhaul of the whole of the Voltronik site – apologies for the lack of updates. Here’s the first of a few posts about what’s been going on.

As you may or may not have seen (if you’re reading this through your feed reader), the Voltronik site has been completely redesigned. This isn’t the topic for today though and I’ll get round to writing a bit about that soon. Let’s talk re-location for now.

The Old Way

Voltronik was hosted by Godaddy – a cheap, well known host operating out of America and was accessible via voltronik.com. This worked pretty well for a while but there were some issues. Firstly Godaddy doesn’t automatically give you email accounts with your domain names. This may or may not be a consequence of the hosting package I was on, i’m not sure. No IMAP mail for me. Secondly, I was using a .com address and thirdly, the site was hosted in a datacenter in America.

The Problems & Fixes

To solve the email problem, i bought a forwarding address through Godaddy that redirects any mail intended for [email protected] to my personal address. Problem 1: Solved, sort of.

Problem 2 and 3 however took a lot more research. I learnt that Google prioritises its search results based on domain extension to give you more accurate results based on your geographic location. This basically means, if you search for ‘web design salisbury’ and you are searching from your home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK, Google will return results with .co.uk address’s first. If you’re searching for ‘web design salisbury’ and you live in Salisbury, MD, USA however, it would return results with a .com address first – search prioritisation based on your geographic location thus resulting in more accurate and relevant search results. I wasn’t helping myself by having a .com address so that was the first decision made – purchase a .co.uk address and forward all traffic for the .com to the .co.uk. If someone asked me now, why i bought a .com address last year, i actually wouldn’t be able to explain myself. I like Great Britain! A .co.uk address would have made a lot more sense in hindsight. Anyway, moving on!

The Search

The search was now on for a UK based datacenter and a decent provider to host voltronik.co.uk. The choice for UK based was 3 fold:
1. Keep it British (help the economy).
2. Reduce load time for the site due to not having to make the ‘trans-atlantic hop’.
3. Find a reliable, feature-plenty, not-to-expensive host.

I did a lot of searching. I found hosts in Cornwall, Yorkshire, Kent and many other places dotted around the UK. Some were very outdated sites and some were very expensive (and didn’t offer much). A noticed a lot of hosts use the BlueSquare datacenter in Maidenhead. Call me what you will but i don’t like the idea of putting all of my eggs in one basket. The Maidenhead datacenter is one of, if not the largest datacenters in the UK but i didn’t want to just go for that because it was the easiest option. I came across a great site that aims to list all of the datacenters around the world. That really helped narrow things down a bit. One host, HavenCo, interested me insanely because it was hosted in an old Naval base called Sealand which is situated just a few miles off of the coast of Suffolk in the North Sea. Sealand is in itself an interesting topic for discussion but i digress so i’ll leave you with their Wikipedia page. HavenCo sounded just too cool but unfortunately, it was lost due to a fire and stopped trading in 2008. Oh well.

The New Way

I did find the right host though and i am really pleased that i went with them. I decided upon Krystal Hosting. Krystal is a UK owned and UK based company that operates out of The Bunker datacenter in Kent. Not only is Krystal everything i was searching for in a host but it is also ridiculously secure. The picture above gives a clue as to it’s workings. Ex-MOD Cold War Bunker. 25 Metres Underground. 3 Metre Concrete Walls. N+1 Power & Cooling. Outside M25. 3ms from London. If you Street View the address of The Bunker on Google Maps, the portion of the road that runs past the entrance to the site has been removed due to request from The Bunker. If there were a zombie epidemic, The Bunker would probably be the only place i would want to be. I highly recommend Krystal if you are considering hosting or changing host anytime soon.

Something important to mention here was that i wanted to avoid hosting the site at a datacenter in London. A popular theme among datacenters outside of London is promoting the IT and tech related crime rate in London and how it could be a risk for your data – one day, the machine your website is hosted on could be stolen and your private data accessed and used by baddies. Not cool. The security of The Bunker won me over on this.

So there we have it. Totally secure (physically – don’t get me started on digitally), in a UK datacenter by a UK host with a .co.uk domain and e-mail access included.

I hope you enjoy the new Voltronik.co.uk

UPDATE: 16th February 2011 – I am so impressed all round with Krystal, the support they provide and their excellent feature set that i have become an affiliate. If you liked this post and are considering changing host to Krystal, please do so through this link. Thanks!


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