AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

Posts Tagged ‘german webhosting’

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