On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 11:44 AM Tim via users
<users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Thu, 2023-06-01 at 11:15 +0930, Tim via users wrote:
> Trying to find decent and affordable hosting in my country is an
> exercise in frustration. Trying to find one that's actually in my
> country is difficult
Realising, after the fact, I hadn't mentioned I'm in Australia, during
this thread...
There's a couple of aspects to wanting local hosting service, apart
from the obvious of wanting to deal with locals and no overseas call
centres. Google will consider my site is Australian if I have an
Australian IP address, or an Australian top-level domain name. And can
return my site as an answer for queries that want local answers,
instead of discarding it as overseas.
I checked with Ionos support. They said they have a presence in
Australia. I pointed out Australia was not listed in the location
drop-down to select a datacenter. There's probably an internal process
to select Australia for your datacenter.
I don't have a .au TLD. You can get personal id.au domain names
without too many hurdles to jump through, but I don't want one of them
(a website in my own name). All the other .au (com.au, net.au, org.au)
domain names required an Australian Business Number, or other similar
business registration, I don't have one of them, nor want to get one.
So having an Australian IP address is the only way to make Google thing
my .com address is Australian.
Most people around here don't understand the purpose of these various
top-level subdomains and think that most sites are either simply
.com.au or .com, so bucking that trend works against you.
While it's a good thing that our name registration system knuckled down
and insisted that .com.au was only used for commercial sites, likewise
with .net.au for business, there's asn.au & .org.au for non-profit
associations and charitable organisations, etc. Using them for their
intended purposes. It's a shame that they didn't have the foresight to
have a general-purpose top domain, having .net.au simply for something
that's on the net would have been a good idea.
Only recently (end of last year) they seem to be opening up .au by
itself for uncategorised purposes, but registrars are price gouging it.
OpenSRS charges $12.50 USD for the various *.au names. I don't know
about the vanity domain names based on ccTLDs, however.
It may be worthwhile to get an OpenSRS reseller account. I have one
because I got tired of companies trying to gouge me in the US. Now I
handle my own registrations for a fraction of the cost.
Jeff