Your thoughts on offshore hosts?

Whats your thoughts on offshore hosts?

Well there are many reasons why I think its worthless. The biggest for me is its used for illegal purposes such as using and distributing Warez. Many people cant afford expensive scripts so they decide to use offshore hosting, as the country they are hosted on don't care for copyright laws so they can use paid scripts for free (also referred to as Nulled) and not have to pay for them.

Its unfair to the people who actually buy them, and to the developers and creators. Another reason would be the security of offshore hosting, as most lack it.. you will see the sites that get hacked most of the time are on offshore hosting.

 

Highly unreliable due to the amount of crap you can put on them, and get away with it

 

And the fact that they are not secure, you are likely to get hacked using them.

 

They are needed only when you host something illegal. Since those countries which offshores, aren't so technically advanced, you can't expect your site to be safe.

 

Yes, I agree, most webmasters would be inclined to use offshore web-hosting if they are hiding something -- something considered to be illegal and therefor not allowed in a normal hosting. Blackhat marketers are fond of utilizing offshore hosts.

 

If you're on offshore hosting, I'd be suspicious of illegal activity. However isn't it cheaper in some ways?

 

it depends on the country I suppose e.g. I'm in the UK and US hosting is a lot cheaper than using a UK host, as as such could be classed as off-shore hosting.

However, I class off-shore hosting to be the smaller and third world countries, because the reliability is bad, and your allowed to get away with illegal activity, etc.

 

Well I wouldn't call UK hosts offshore as they still follow the copyright laws, and hosts that don't do that I would call offshore such as you mentioned the third world countries.

 

Now see, I'm going to completely disagree.

We own our software and anyone & everyone is welcome to double check that claim

vBulletin: http://www.vbulletin.com/piracy.php
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Invision: http://www.invisionpower.com/company/piracy.php

But you'll never see me ever using an onshore host. It has been my personal experience that the onshore hosting market is far to cluttered and thus, while there is indeed competition... That competition has had a bad affect on the market.

Think of it like the dollar inflation... So much money has been printed, that its becoming worthless. Well there are so many onshore host, that support has commonly become scripted (less personal) and drastically oversold.

Another things is while America claims to be the most independent and free society, next to china we are 2nd with the most "pending" or "debated" censorship and privacy laws (for online).

 

So you've actually found a decent offshore host? Was it hard to do? How many did you go through before you found the right one?

 

If he finds a nice and reliable one than thats great for him, but there is no reason to lie that 90% of all offshore hosts are crap, and you dont get what you pay for.

 

Huh, well in my opinion in that case you should make your own server to host your site on instead of having to deal with crap like that. Sounds like your own server would have more uptime than the offshore ones.

 

How can a forum owner or webmaster tell whether or not the hosting company they are working with is offshore, so to speak? Do they have to list that on their website? This is a big concern for me, cause I'm worried I might get involved with an offshore hosting company, not realizing, and not even know it till my site is hacked.

 

Well its pretty easy to tell, they will either have it mentioned somewhere in their website, or you will be able to tell by finding out where their servers are hosted. If its not hosted in America, Canada, or UK it can be called offshore.