We have a number of clients looking for proxy IP hosting - anyone know of an organisation specialising in this service?

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

Google doesn't act this way. None of my sites are hosted in Spain but they correctly appear as spanish, both in google.com and google.es

Sorry Andy I cannot help you with the proxy IP hosting services.

I tested abretelibro.com on Google.es.
- Búsqueda la Web (search the web): YOUR PAGE IS IN THE RESULTS
- Búsqueda páginas en español (pages in spanish): YOUR PAGE IS IN THE RESULTS
- Búsqueda páginas de España (search spanish websites): YOUR PAGE IS NOT IN THE RESULTS

Why?
The IP-address for this domain (208.109.78.140) is US.

Ok, I see your point now, you were talking about the country and not the language.

But taking into account how many people uses the feature to search only in a certain country, it might result is not worth the hassle of finding a hosting company in that country, if users don't even know how to use this option, or bother using it.

I think this feature is used more then most people think, specially in countries like France, Germany and Spain.

I would love to find a company which offered that service Europe-wide - but I don't believe there are any - so we are currently planning to create this service as a result.....

Andy

Greeting to all from Italy !
was catching you on this hosting issue - we have 12 years of experience and are now setting up servers in data centers her in Europe - France to be more explicit.

As far as I know IP is not the main issue for placement, but the extension is.

They way I understand is that you'll want the geographical extension for each country where you want top rankings, not as much an IP from that country.

The Search Engines are well aware of the fluidity of the market and how people tend buy where prices are cheaper.

Let's take Italy for example - hosting and housing in data centers is very expensive compare to neighboring France or Germany, so many Italians are hosting abroad.

I understand what you are saying and asking - I'd be interested in knowing more on how much of an impact on placement a geographical IP would have.

Does anyone have hands on experience to share ??

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Hey,
IMO Hosted IP is a factor and can give you an extra fore at competitive search results (mainly at MSN'S live search for now).

Hi Georgh,

Actually this is not entirely correct. You are halfway there;
In order to appear in the "local" results of Google, in this case Google.fr - pages from France, the main determining factor is ccTLD.
This means that having the .fr domain alone is already enough to be added to the local google.fr results.

The IP story only really kicks in when you are using a .com or other generic domain, Google uses it as a sort of "second-level" check to determine in what results your site should appear.
It is widely argued that it can't hurt having both a local ccTLD as well as a local IP - every little bit helps as the saying goes.

If your site does not appear yet - despite having the local domain, I would suggest building some quality links from French sites. This will ensure that your site gets picked up and included in the local results.

Hope that helps!