AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

As part of our planned expansions into other countries for AnswerHero, we have two major things to consider:

1) Hosting – how should we do it for each country version (read the blog post here)
2) Domains – do we go sub domains, sub directories or unique domain?

Now when it comes to sub domains or sub directories, it can lead to various problems. Matt Cutts explains this here so rather than me waffle on – read his wise words.

In any event we wanted to do it the hard way and create a separate site for each country. This obviously meant getting the domains. The first thing we did was decide which countries we have plans for and which we do not. Some countries we have decided not to target at all in any eventuality so even though countries like india have huge traffic and will get bigger exponetially, we have left it from our list full stop.

The good news was, that for every country we wanted a domain for – it was free. With the exception of the .com which I manage to buy for a very reasonable sum.

The main issue with certain country extensions is that you have to have either a company or a residence within the country. I got quotes from three companies that said thay can provide this as a virtual service for us. It was staggering how much variation each quote came in at. For the full regsitration service (including the virtual residence/business aspect), it varied from £2000 down to £800. Most expensive was Globalgold.co.uk

The company we used in the end was Instra.com – they were excellent.

The next site we are rolling out is AnswerHero.de