More to the point, WTF is an 'ethical' host? I'm sooo sick and tired of people badging products and/or services as 'ethical' and 'green'. What does an 'ethical' host do differently? Do they drive to work in Toyota Priuses? Do they only use 'fair trade' coffee in the coffee maker?
Thanks for saying what I was thinking. Green, fairtrade, ethical, these concepts do strike me as areas where there can be a lot of confusion and contradictions, areas that can open up a lot of questions, and areas that will mean very different things to different people.
In some ways any ecommerce operation delivering physical goods might be thought of as not green, because it is more green to walk to your local shop and buy locally produced products with local materials, not ordering from some online shop that sources their products from around the world which ultimately arrives at the shop by road transport, which is then delivered to the customer by road transport (all contributing to road congestion), even if some money is paid in carbon offsetting (and if so which
carbon offsetting scheme).
A green host might use green energy, but are they also energy efficient or support home working rather than running offices which people commute to. Green might also be detrimental to your business. Do they try to save on extra servers by stuffing as many websites onto the same server, or do they use old outdated servers rather than throwing them away for new servers (look at my slow green website). Is different server hardware produced by certain PC manufacturers greener than others in terms of renewables and impact to the environment once it is disposed of? Do they also use energy efficient light bulbs, or lower powered processors? Or to take it to the next level of jest do they let their hardware run a little hotter to save energy on cooling, or do they cool their hardware to minimise their impact on global warming?
I've just noticed that rackspace in the uk have a
green policy (but even
tree planting is a debated issue).
An ethical host might say that they donate 10% of their profits to good causes, but this is meaningless if they run their company on a non-profit accounting basis (i.e. high salaries rather profits and dividends). Is there an ethical difference between open source hosting and Microsoft hosting?
To me an ethical host is one that doesn't litter our post boxes with junk mail or paper invoices, one that doesn't take out multi-page adverts in every related magazine, but most of all one that is honest with their customers, one that doesn't try to deceive, and one that gives good advice that is in the best interest of the customer.
I am planning to move to a new hosting company very soon and they have suggested I change from a .com address to a co.uk address as it will help with google rankings
For the OP's new host to not look at the wider picture of inbound links and say drop the .com, and move to a .co.uk to help google rankings is simply not true, and therefore the new host is not what I would consider an ethical host.
I have a lot of links using .com and now have a page rank of 2 (v.proud of this as I have done it all myself and I'm no techno wizard). So will I have to change all those links to co.uk or risk google thinking my site is less important?
A page rank of 2 is fairly easy to come by, even without many inbound links, and page rank in itself is not that important. The only thing that is really important is where you appear in the search engine for your targeted search terms. Pagerank does not contribute to this directly, only indirectly in certain cases.
People see websites doing well in searches for certain terms, they look at the site's high page rank, and think that the pagerank directly contributes to this ranking. This is not the case directly since pagerank is an arbitrary score that is search term neutral (you have a pagerank score regardless of a search term) whereas overall search engine ranking for a search term is a score based on the given search term.
Google uses around 200 factors to determine a site's ranking for a specific search term. Google also uses quite a few factors to determine a generic pagerank score. Some of these factors used for both calculations are similar and there is overlap (e.g. internal and external inbound links) and that is the main reason why some sites who do well in search engine ranking also have good pagerank. But it doesn't necessarily follow that a high PR site will rank well for any search term.
Will switching to co.uk help my google rankings in the Uk as this is where most of my customers are?
It wont help or improve your current situation, due to the inbound links pointing to the .com, but it will provide some compensation for the big drop you encounter if you just moved your .com to non-UK hosting. Only when you address your inbound link situation will you start to see similar results again.
It is possible to inform google that your .com website is mainly a UK website, but it does involve some jiggery pokery on a search engine specific basis - for instance if you google 'pages in the UK' search for
best ecommerce solution, you will find actinic.com (US hosted) no 3, actinic.co.uk (UK hosted) no 1, and our humble
ecommerce service awebapart.com (UK hosted) no 2!
Non-UK .com hosting and targeting the UK is possible with some search engines, but it is not as easy as just having a .com UK-hosted site (which works on most of the major search engines).
