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As some of you may be aware if you've been following my ramblings here over the last few months Steve and I have been searching for some good hosting. Now before you start to inundate me with offers of hosting let me tell you that we are perfectly happy with Phatservers who are hosting our dedicated box over in the States. So we're not searching for more US based hosting; instead we're looking for some comparable hosting here in Australia.

We're looking for it here in Australia because we're beginning to see a move from Google to apply more credit to sites that are hosted in their home countries. Now quite frankly that sucks on a number of levels and one of the worst is the less than stellar standard of hosting that's available in some of those 'home' countries.

It seems that we have really been spoiled over the years with our good US hosting because so much of what we take for granted with our dedicated box is either not catered for here in Australia or comes at such an enormous cost it's pointless to even think about it.

Things that come as standard on dedicated boxes with most of the major adult hosts in the US are extras here in Australia and you have to pay for them. Here it's just not possible to have a dedicated box for anything like the price of the one we have in the US and while many advertise boxes at a comparable price the extras in the fine print soon push the cost well above anything we would be paying for the same 'extras' in America.

Even with virtual hosting the situation is the same. We thought we had found a reasonable virtual host for a number of our small sites ... and we were even going to start moving some of our clients to hosting packages with that host but now we're thinking twice about it.

This morning - after a weekend of hassles - we finally got the DNS for one of our Australian domains sorted out and the site became visible. We had uploaded it last week but it took days to get the Registrar to sort out a problem at their end and today they finally did it.

So the first thing we wanted to do was make sure that all the pages were there ... but the navigation had disappeared. Because it's a site that is could develop into something quite complex we had written the navigation as a server side include but it wasn't appearing so we contacted the host.

Sorry ... we don't cater for sites that require SSI and you're the first person who ever asked about it.

Ok, so we're off in search of another host who doesn't have to go and read up on how to have SSI operating on their servers and we find one that looks ... well ... semi ok. We can live with a gig of disk space and 6 gig of transfer ... remember this is Australia, a land of bushrangers who now don't lurk on country roads but instead inhabit data centers. But then we notice that this host offers htaccess as an advanced feature ... an advanced feature? Htaccess is bedrock basic and these guys are calling it an advanced feature?

Maybe we'll look somewhere else.

Yep, here's another real gem - 100 meg of disk space and 2 gig of transfer for a price that would even make a bushranger blush. If I want to waste my money there are more enjoyable ways of doing it than paying their hosting fees.

Here's another one that looks ok ... but wait ... there are no excess bandwidth bills? What do they do, turn you off when you reach your limit each month? I don't even waste my time emailing them to find out.

Don't laugh, this is Australia where hosting is beginning to look very definitely like something you would expect in a third-world country.

And so the search is going on and the deeper we dig into the listings in Google the more disillusioned we are becoming. I'm not sure why those who work in the Googleplex and are so far removed from reality seem to think that mysite.com - that deals with things Australian - is any less important than mysite.com.au (even when they have the same content) but they do so we have to find something here in Australia that's comparable to the quality hosting we get in the US

Perhaps it's time I reorganized Steve's hobby priorities too and encouraged him to break the wrapping on the Fedora Core disk he got in the mail the other day and install it on the old machine borrowed from the computer shop a week ago and that remains where dumped on the floor in the lounge room. Perhaps the time is a lot closer for us our own dedicated server ... owned and operated by us ... than we thought.

But whatever the situation for us might be ...don't you fall into the trap of accepting second-rate hosting. If you're in the United States or your business focus is in the US then that's where you want to host because no one in their right mind would host here in Australia when the standard is so poor compared to elsewhere.

And from what I hear we're not alone. There are quite a few countries that have similar hosting problems. Thanks Google you make me feel so warm and fuzzy inside.