Get Your Account with UK based IP's!

[GatorChad]

As you all probably know by now, HostGator is fully hosted (servers, network, etc.) in Texas, USA. This works out great for our U.S. clients because Texas has tons of bandwidth and even if you're up North or on the West/East coasts the speed is great.

We've been testing a new technology, that will let us route IP's from data centers in the UK and outher countries in Europe. So basically you will host your site on a HostGator server in Texas, but you'll be able to assign it an IP from another country. Pretty cool?

Right now, we've been doing some testing here and it's working great, and we'd like to open up this up to our forum members to gauge the interest on this technology, and also find some beta testers.

We only have 10 beta spots open at the moment to test out UK (London) IP's. So if you're interested, please reply to this thread and let us know.

Who's eligible?
Any shared web hosting clients (hatchling, baby, business) are eligible for this.
We are no longer accepting new beta testers at this time. Thanks for your interest!

What do you get?
For beta testing this, you'll receive 2 months free on your hosting account.

Why would you want this?

1. If most of your website's audience is based in the UK, this should allow for quicker site access times.
2. If you have a web site that is trying to rank in say google.co.uk, you should see a significant increase in the ranking because the site will now be on a UK IP.

Let me know if you have any questions, we're all real excited to get this rolling.

[paulus2005]

This is quite interesting - however I am not sure quite how I would handle this - possible need 2 accounts - one for my UK sites and another for US/International sites. Does this sound right?

Is this going to be available for Reseller Accounts as well? That would be very neat!

Look forwards to see what happens.

[kestral]

I would be interested in becoming a beta tester for this

I run a quite large UK based TV show fansite and the majority of the sites visitors and members are from the UK. This should hopefully speed up the members and visitors access to the site, and I've thought in the past if a move to UK based servers would be a viable and beneficial move, and this certainly sounds as if it would be an easier alternative to moving servers and transferring everything

[GatorChad]

Thanks for the interest!

Originally Posted by paulus2005

This is quite interesting - however I am not sure quite how I would handle this - possible need 2 accounts - one for my UK sites and another for US/International sites. Does this sound right?

Is this going to be available for Reseller Accounts as well? That would be very neat!

Look forwards to see what happens.

Well, we can put your entire account with UK/US sites on the UK IP, but it might be best to separate it. Do you want me to create you a free account for your UK site(s)? This may be available to resellers down the road, but once we know this works it will become a feature for SEO Hosting.

Originally Posted by kestral

I would be interested in becoming a beta tester for this

I'm PM'ing you now for details.

[Keith W]

Is this going to be a free service or something we are going to have to pay extra for?

Also I am not to sure how this all works - forgive me for my thinking here - if my site is hosted in the USA and it takes say 5 seconds to load etc. how would having a UK IP that has to ultimately go to the USA be any faster, surely it would take longer because it has to go through a UK IP first to get to the USA, adding an extra stage in if you like and possibly adding an extra 5 seconds to the load time.

Or is my thinking of how this works totally crap and should be flushed down the sewers of the Internet?

[WHNChris]

It would be great to see this on reseller accounts.

[GatorDaveC]

I've taken one of our free templates and stuck it on one of our servers so you guys in Europe can test the speed.

For the best results, I recommend flushing your cache after trying each mirror.

The US mirror where the data is stored is located here : http://74.53.82.2/~uktest/

The UK host is located here http://uktest.hostgator.com/

Let me know how the speed is!

[dvk01uk]

will this ever be available on dedicated servers

[fanfavorite]

I'd be interested in this for Canada.

[regentronique]

I will add my vote to fanfavorite request.

[GatorDaveC]

A Canadian host will be in the works once our beta testing is done.

Originally Posted by regentronique

I will add my vote to fanfavorite request.

[christfirstforums]

will this cost more in the future? aka added service? if not i'd like to help Beta this on my Realmsoflegacy.com account

[kmaw]

Originally Posted by GatorDaveC

A Canadian host will be in the works once our beta testing is done.

Yeah to DaveC for looking after the motherland...

Actually, I get better speeds now with HG than with some Toronto based hosts

[bickern]

I really want this for my reseller account, most of my clients are UK based.

[cumro25]

I downloaded the new opera browser to test it (3o mts ago,
I decided to look at this forum saw this thread.
Speed both links quick!
But the google aspect appeals to me.
So enroll my baby hosting site for the two months beta trial
thanks

[GatorDaveC]

Anyone who wants the Beta.. PM me with the following information...

- The domain you want the IP change on
- Your address on file.

I really only want to do single domains at this time... multiple domain functionality should be done later next week.

[infinique]

This is interesting. I've already gotten 50 blocks the CBlock IPs. I'll probably look into this when I have new domains for allocation.

[cumro25]

"Anyone who wants the Beta.. PM me with the following information...

- The domain you want the IP change on
- Your address on file."

I am confused
PM ?
address? business address or hosting address.
I suppose it is obvious to you who know, but I am welsh you see!

[GvilleRick]

PM = Private Message. Send a private message by clicking on GatorDaveC's username on the post above and include the domain you wish to use to test in the message. I suspect the address on file refers to your address as found in the billing records and is likely to verify your identity.

[stagetalk]

I have already contacted with HG online chat team and they said it will be launched in a month or so and also advised me to contact with sales team but when I contacted with them: they said they don't have any plan and also it is not possible to have UK IP to your account.

[GvilleRick]

Originally Posted by stagetalk

I have already contacted with HG online chat team and they said it will be launched in a month or so and also advised me to contact with sales team but when I contacted with them: they said they don't have any plan and also it is not possible to have UK IP to your account.

You should follow the instructions in the other posts from staff in this thread and send a Private Message if you are interested. The Live Chat techs are not always aware of beta programs.

[stagetalk]

Originally Posted by GvilleRick

You should follow the instructions in the other posts from staff in this thread and send a Private Message if you are interested. The Live Chat techs are not always aware of beta programs.

I have mentioned about this post....but they said no...anyway i am going to send a private message.

[Keith W]

It would be nice if the staff answered the questions that have been asked in this thread, especially the one about the ongoing cost, if any, of using this service

[GatorDaveC]

We are probably thinking about using this as an Addon for SEOHosting.com. We aren't sure about prices at this time. We want to make sure the service is stable, secure etc.. first.

And for your question about you connecting from the UK to a site in the USA...

Our data center recently opened up a London location, which has almost direct routing from the USA to the UK. The only slow down is the obvious.. Atlantic Ocean which caused the latency between servers to be around 100-110ms. Even with the higher latency, we are still able to use pretty much 100% of our bandwidth between the servers.

On top of all of this. Anything we can cache, we will cache on the UK server. Most images, CSS, JS, html, and even some PHP pages can be cached. Caching content on the hard drive and in memory makes the page loads almost instant.

Content we don't cache would be anything that uses sessions, which includes user logins etc..

If you have any questions let me know.

Originally Posted by Keith W

It would be nice if the staff answered the questions that have been asked in this thread, especially the one about the ongoing cost, if any, of using this service

[Keith W]

Thanks for that Dave