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It has been a while since my last post, we got diverted on another project but we are back on AnswerHero. As a quick update we are planning on creating a number of country variations for the brand and as such have been successful in securing all the domains we intend to launch in.

We decided that we wanted to differentiate the logo in some way to show users which country-site they were on. It was quite tricky as trying to incorporate a country flag anywhere on the body of the logo made it too small. Initially we looked at having a flag on his chest, but that was too small a space to work with so was no good, then we tried making a bandana with the flag on it. This just looked a bit odd. We also tried his cap in the country flag but it was not clear enough. In the end we settled on a solution which works (we think) really well.

Our designers (Stylemix LLC) did a superb job of it. Below are all the variation we did. By the way, the transaltions you see are meant to be “Find Your Answer” which we used Google Transalate to do. If we have made a glaring cock up, please feel free to tell us how stupid we are here in the comments. but also tell us the correct wording… When I did it I checked the reverse translation back to English and apart from the Sweden one being plural, (Find Your Answers, which is acceptable we think) they all made sense.

www.answerhero.co.uk

www.answerhero.dk

www.answerhero.fr

www.answerhero.com

www.answerhero.de

www.answerhero.it

www.answerhero.pl

www.answerhero.es

www.answerhero.se

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

Being as we have almost got the UK (.co.uk) version on AnswerHero done from an indexing and basic user features point of view- (still a few cosmetics tweaks needed), we decided to get on with the task of rolling out new country sites.

When we decided to take AnswerHero global, (sounds a bit grand I know but as many of you will know, it’s no small undertaking to decide to create other couintry versions of a service, we will tell you how we get on with everything involved for AnswerHero on this blog) we set about deciding on which countries we wanted to feature in – once we had decided that, my job was to acquire the domains. You can read about what we did here to get tricky domains like .fr registered. To summarise it for you – we now have every country domain we wanted (10 in total).

We have been storing as many other language “who, what, where, how, etc” style queries in a DB and with the technical aspects working ok, the next task is to go and find an appropriate host. Not quite as straightforward as you would think. The key thing we need to bear in mind is that each site must ideally be hosted within the country we are wanting to rank for. You may disagree with this, of course Google is clever enough to work out which country a site is meant for but in reality, it sets you back a long way in getting indexed and ranked properly if you do not do the basic ground work of getting hosted in-country based on the domain.

The sort of issues we faced were the fact that the site is good old ASP, also we are being cheap bastards and going for shared hosting, until such time as traffic merits a dedicated server anyway. The issue is that most shared servers within the prices lines we wanted to pay were either PHP or ASP.net. We need ASP and MySql.

To cut a long story short – I eventually found hosteurope.de to be most accomodating. They have confirmed to me that their servers are based in Germany but I am going to double check that before I buy. I was going to go for a 1and1 server package – assuming that because they are German, it would be German based… wrong! you only get a German based server if you sign up with 1und1.de – if you use their UK version of the site 1and1.co.uk, the servers are based outside Germany – so it is worth checking.

Here is the package we are 99% going for – and for 15 EURO/mth not bad value:

* IIS: 6.0
* Microsoft FTP Server 6.0
* NET Framework 1.1
* NET Framework 2.0
* Windows Service Pack 2

Plesk und installierte Software:

* ASP 6.0.3790.4195
* ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
* ASP.NET Enterprise Manager 0.1.3
* AWStats 6.6 (build 1.887)
* BIND DNS Server 9.4.2-P1
* DrWeb 4.44.0.10170 (E-Mail)
* FastCGI 6.1.36.1
* Horde Webmail IMP H3 (4.1.6)
* MailEnable Standard 1.986
* myLittleAdmin 2000 2.7.r126, 2005 3.2
* MySQL 5.0.45
* MySQL ODBC connector 3.51.25
* Perl v5.8.8 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
* Plesk: 8.6.0.5
* Plesk Agent 1.5.2.1
* PHP 4.4.7
* PHP 5.2.6
* phpMyAdmin 2.11.6
* Python 2.5.0.0
* SpamAssassin 3.2.3
* stunnel 4.07
* Webalizer V2.01-10-RB02 (Windows NT 5.2) English

Plesk 8.6 Third-Party;

Mailserver:

* MailEnable Standard 1.986
* MailEnable Professional 3.14
* MailEnable Enterprise 3.14
* Merak 9.2.1
* SmarterMail 5.1
* MDaemon 9.6.6
* hMailServer 4.4.1
* CommuniGate Pro 5.2.3

Antivirus:

* DrWeb 4.44.0.10170 (E-Mail)
* Kaspersky AV 5.0.0.49 (E-Mail)
* ClamWin 0.93
* Merak Antivirus (E-Mail)

DNS Server:

* Microsoft DNS 5.2
* BIND DNS Server 9.4.2-P1
* Simple DNS Plus 5.0

FTP Server:

* Microsoft FTP 6.0
* Gene6 FTP Server 3.10
* Serv-U FTP Server 6.4

Webstatistiken:

* Webalizer V2.01-10-RB02
* AWStats 6.6
* SmarterStats 3.3
* Urchin 5.7

SiteBuilder:

* SiteBuilder for Windows 4.2.108

Web Administration Tools:

* phpMyAdmin 2.11.6
* ASP.NET Enterprise Manager 0.1.3
* myLittleAdmin 2000 2.7.r126, 2005 3.2

Datenbankserver:

* Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Verwaltung über Plesk nur in Verbindung mit VPS MAX mit MS SQL Server Workgroup)
* MySQL 5.0.45

Webmail:

* Horde IMP H3 (4.1.6)
* MailEnable Web Client
* IceWarp Web Mail
* SmarterMail Web Client
* CommuniGate Pro Web Client

Spam-Filter:

* SpamAssassin 3.2.3
* Merak Spamfilter
* SmarterMail Spamfilter

Stand: 30.03.2009