Most hosting companies are located in US and most of the prices are quoted in US dollar, but if you need a web hosting company in UK and pay local currency then maybe PickAWeb could be something for you. They offer hosting accounts in UK with most features you would need to build a modern web site.

All their account got cPanel as the hosting control panel and you get features like MySQL, PHP, Perl, CGI. If you select one of the more expensive packages you also get forum, wiki and blog software installed. Most of these softwares are free on the web so you wouldn't really need to upgrade just because to get them installed, but more in the case you need more web space and data transfers.

Their smallest hosting account got 1,000 Mb web space and 10,000 Mb data transfer for £2.98/month. If you pay for one year at once you also get your domain for free, but please make sure it's registered in your name. If you pay monthly their domain names are kind of pricey at £8.99/year for a simple .com domain.

The only downsides I've found is that they only qoute their prices in GBP and their domain name pickaweb.co.uk is registered to a private person instead of a company that is the normal way when companies register domain names

Web Hosting UK from Xavier Media®

A couple of weeks ago I signed a contract and got the question why I had such effective signature (it's basically just A and d in my name). The answer is because of my previous job where I sometimes could sign document after document all day long. Since I sometimes didn't have time for coffee I figured that I needed a new signature, something faster and something easier, so I developed a new signature. This answer wasn't really the answer the people who asked the question hoped for. They guessed on pop star, which would have made this story much more fun and entertaining

Several weeks later (and a few dreams about becoming a pop star) later I searched at Google Video for a (I think) Slovenian group called Skuter. It turns out that they have changed name to Skater instead, but during the searches I made I found another (I think) Slovenian video:

I have no idea what they're singing, but just look at two of the group members (I will let you do the guessing ). I'm not a big fan of polka, but if the girls look like that then I'm open to suggestions . Just check out this (also) Slovenian music video from Atomik Harmonik:

So here's my plan: Since beautiful girls seem to like polka I'm going team up with someone to do a music video. Since I can't play any instrument, can't sing and can't write the text I have to hire someone to do that. The singing part wouldn't be any problem, I just hire two (or maybe even four) beautiful girls, so beautiful that everyone forget all about the singing….. Then when the music video can be found on YouTube.com I can tell the pop star story about my signature.

So who's with me on this project?

I don't want to be a computer geek any more….. from Xavier Media®

On the 25th of March 2006 I published a list of popular top level domain names (TLD) and the number of pages hosted on each TLD. When Xavier Media some time later started counting the number of pages on a regular basis for Xavier Media Whois Database (can be found at whois.xaviermedia.com) we noticed a slow drop in rank for the Swedish top level domain (.se).

On the 25th of March 2006 the .se TLD was found on the 14th place on the list, but on the toplist from today (11th of December 2007) the .se TLD is only on 21st place! Is the .se domain loosing ground to other top level domains? I would say yes. The .com TLD is really popular in many countries and also in Sweden. The .nu domain is not as popular as it used to be (years ago), but it's still being used for web sites (nu is the Swedish word for now).

It's going to be interesting to see if this development continues….

/Andreas

Here's todays TOP 40:

Number of pages hosted on TLD domains 2007/12/11:
1. .com – 17 800 000 000 pages
2. .org – 2 190 000 000 pages
3. .jp – 2 120 000 000 pages
4. .net – 1 610 000 000 pages
5. .de – 1 410 000 000 pages
6. .cn – 934 000 000 pages
7. .ru – 886 000 000 pages
8. .uk – 840 000 000 pages
9. .edu – 601 000 000 pages
10. .it – 395 000 000 pages
11. .nl – 361 000 000 pages
12. .pl – 294 000 000 pages
13. .fr – 280 000 000 pages
14. .tw – 276 000 000 pages
15. .gov – 261 000 000 pages
16. .us – 246 000 000 pages
17. .ca – 240 000 000 pages
18. .au – 232 000 000 pages
19. .info – 163 000 000 pages
20. .ch – 160 000 000 pages
21. .se – 152 000 000 pages
22. .dk – 130 000 000 pages
23. .br – 130 000 000 pages
24. .at – 121 000 000 pages
25. .es – 116 000 000 pages
26. .be – 112 000 000 pages
27. .no – 109 000 000 pages
28. .hk – 86 800 000 pages
29. .fi – 79 200 000 pages
30. .hu – 73 600 000 pages
31. .cc – 64 700 000 pages
32. .nz – 55 200 000 pages
33. .biz – 51 500 000 pages
34. .ar – 47 900 000 pages
35. .tv – 47 600 000 pages
36. .eu – 44 700 000 pages
37. .il – 44 200 000 pages
38. .za – 35 500 000 pages
39. .gr – 34 300 000 pages
40. .th – 30 700 000 pages

46. .nu - 22 800 000 pages

Source: Xavier Media

"The .se drop" from Xavier Media®

I saw a post about that some time ago in a webmaster forum. Since I myself own a couple of .us domains and I also got a lot of other country code domain names I started doing some research on this subject.

Field study 1: I started my research by visiting one of the biggest .us sites, del.icio.us, and selected the first two keywords I could find on their site: social bookmarking. I then pointed by browser to Google and entered "social bookmarking" (without the "") in the search field. As number two in the search result I found del.icio.us, so I guess that's acceptable.

Field study 2: I visited another big .us web site, mon.itor.us, and did the same thing as with del.icio.us but using the keywords "free websites performance". The results where almost as good as in the case of del.icio.us because I found mon.itor.us as number three in the search results. I did another search, but this time for just "websites performance" and mon.itor.us was found as number four in the results.

These two field studies show us that it's possible to build a successful and high ranking website using a .us domain name . It shouldn't be any different if you use a .uk, .se, .dk, .eu or whatever top level domain for your site.

If you got more examples of successful and high ranking .us websites, please feel free to let me know

/Andreas

Will a .us domain get poor ranking in search engines? from Xavier Media®

Just a note to let you know that XavierMedia.eu had just started to undergo a major change.
The site served very little purpose, mostly offering some freebies for mobilephones, but hopefully it can be transformed into the European central for Xavier Media. The site will start off supporting English, French and German. A directory will soon be set up, and possibly a few additional services (we will see). Depending on popularity, further expansion in the future is probable.
Be sure to keep your eye on the site, and I will post again when further progress is made!

XavierMedia Europe from Xavier Media®