If you live in UK or if you got most of your customers there it could be a good idea to setup a web hosting account with an UK service provider instead of using many of the popular US based hosting providers. This to improve response times and accessibility. It could also be good if you're located in UK to use a UK hosting company so you can pay in your local currency.

PickaWeb is a UK based hosting company with UK prices. Their packages ranges everything from 1,000 Mb of web space up to 5,000 Mb  which is basically all you need to run any web site, and of course on Linux servers. The offer a generous uptime guarantee of 99.95% which means a maximum down-time per month of 21 minutes.

All packages include a free domain with all annual hosting packages and you get cPanel as hosting control panel . If you prefer to pay for your domain you can register most of the popular TLDs like .co.uk, .org.uk and .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .mobi, .info, .name and .eu from them at pretty standard prices.

Belive it or not but not all hosting companies offer PayPal payments as payment option, but PickaWeb do! This is good since most of us are getting paid from our own custoemrs by Paypal.

If you're in the need for UK Web Hosting you should have a look at PickAWeb.co.uk. They've been in the business since 2000 and according to their own web site they offer cheap and reliable hosting with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The uptime guarantee means that your site will be down no more then 8.76 hours per year or 86.4 seconds per day. Most hosting companies offer this type of guarantee these years so it's really not that special.

PickAWeb do have a nice thing and that's that you get your domain for free when you order a yearly plan. This is good if you don't have a domain already, but you should make sure that the domain is registered in your own name and that you can transfer it from them in case you want to host your site elsewhere in the future.

When I looked at their hosting plans I noticed something really weird. They charge the same amount per month for both the webmaster plan and the business plan, but you get much more web space an features with the business plan. So if you're going to order any of those two plans I recommend you go for the business plan (you never know how much reasources like space you need in the future ).

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