Hi Andy,

The answer to your question is:
You can use almost any hosting company you want!

I guess your clients are asking about this since regional search engines look at the IP address rather than just the TLD characters when determine if a site is fx. French or not.

Here is an example:
Currently www.dohop.fr (“.fr” is the top level domain for France) is hosted along with all other dohop pages at Rackspace in UK, using a UK IP-address. Since the site has a UK IP-address Google thinks it is a UK site, hence it doesn’t display it in when you search for dohop on google.fr filtering out pages that are not French.

What you need to do:
Find a hosting company in the country you want to localize your TLD, in our case in France, and ask them to set up a small server. Set up a reverse proxy on that server (it doesn’t have to be a fancy server, since its only job is to redirect traffic) that redirects the traffic to you main hosting, in our case in at Rackspace in UK.

NOTE: Don’t save a few bucks on bandwidth. It is essential that the communication between the reverse proxy and the main hosting is flawless.

I like to deal with as few as possible hosting companies regarding this. Since we already have our site hosted at Rackspace we will use them for our .com reverse proxy in the US.

Can anybody recommend a good and solid hosting company that operates in most European countries?

I expect that we will begin this work very soon, so all suggestions would be great.

Regards,
Georg Haraldsson
e-commerce manager at dohop.com flight planner