Barry Hand

A few years back some friends of mine were mak­ing a one night stop close to my home­town, en route back to the big schmoke of Dublin. Being the pos­ses­sor of local knowl­edge they asked me where they could find some­where good to eat, with a par­tic­u­lar han­ker­ing for some tasty steaks.

Luck­ily I knew just the place, a restau­rant I’d been to only a few months back where I had enjoyed a deli­cious sir­loin. I gave them the direc­tions and sent them on their way. It was only a week or two later that I caught up with them and inquired how they got on.

There were some hmms and haws, when they even­tu­ally said that the food was awful, the worst they had ever tasted in fact. I couldn’t apo­logu­ise enough as it was my endorse­ment of the place in which they had trusted.

I later found out the restau­rant had changed own­er­ship and was liv­ing on past glory’s, Les­son learned, I’ll think twice before rec­om­mend­ing any ser­vice to any­one, which is some­thing that we Irish relay on a lot — Word of Mouth.

I often get asked for opin­ions on ser­vices & prod­ucts, most of them IT related, and as most of my work and spare time revolve around var­i­ous aspects of the Inter­net, I fre­quently have queries relat­ing to Web Host­ing. At this point I could sim­ply just rec­om­mend my employer, but hav­ing learned the lessons of bad steaks & friend­ship, I would need to feel 100% con­fi­dent of the ser­vice before even men­tion­ing it.

The acid-test being my recent expe­ri­ence with the intric­i­ties of web host­ing & domains while mov­ing a 20+ domain account who had expe­ri­enced suf­fi­cient down­time that it was caus­ing embar­rass­ment for the own­ers, and wanted to move all their domains and host­ing to another sup­plier, it was here that the finer side of what an expe­ri­enced host­ing team can do shone through, with ease of trans­fer and con­fig­u­ra­tion all com­pleted smoothly over a short period. I was impressed.

But it’s not just guys who know what they’re doing, there’s also the whole infra­struc­ture behind it, some­thing I’d never put much thought into before, host­ing lots of web­sites requires a top notch Data Cen­tre and all the extras that go with it like 24 Mon­i­tor­ing and guar­an­teed ser­vice lev­els on power & con­nec­tiv­ity. (you can actu­ally drop in for a tour as well)

Which brings me back onto what I’ll be doing this week­end, I’m mov­ing most all of my sites over to Digi­web Host­ing includ­ing Wiffy​.ie which is now over a year old, and boasts 1000+ vis­i­tors a day.

Keep­ing Nin­tendo aficionado’s happy can be dif­fi­cult, as even the slight­est down­time can cause mem­bers to ques­tion the reli­a­bil­ity of the site, and if Digi­webs Host­ing is capa­ble of dri­ving the boards​.ie jug­ger­naut thats the best word of mouth rec­om­men­da­tion I need.