Finding The Missing Irish Websites

Over the last few years, the Irish web has changed drastically. Most of it had been hosted outside of Ireland due to the extortionate fees charged by Irish ISPs to host websites. It was cheaper to host Irish websites in the UK and the US. But with the growth of the Irish hosting industry, it is now easier and cheaper than it was to host a website in Ireland. The Irish ISPs now only account for 25% of the Irish website business and that continues to fall. Irish Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) account for the rest. But there is still a section of the Irish web that hosts on US and UK servers.

The reasons for this are many. The traditionally high cost of hosting in Ireland is a factor but one of the more important reasons is that these websites are hosted abroad because of the webdevelopers. The Irish hosting business is a curious mix between dedicated HSPs like Hosting365,Novara and Blacknightsolutions.com and web development companies with a lot of clients.

While the HSPs are easy to categorise, but many of the web development companies still use legacy solutions and host their clients in the US or UK on shared or dedicated hosting. WhoisIreland.com tracks the hosting patterns of approximately 970 Irish hosters. These are the easily identified Irish hosters and the statistics on these hoster forms part of the Irish hosting industry reports that WhoisIreland.com provides each month. But there is a part of the Irish web that has been, up until now, difficult to track - the missing Irish web.

For the Irish web, that missing section hosted in the UK, US and elsewhere could be as much as 15% of the overall Irish web. That’s potentially thousands of Irish websites that are missing from the “pages from Ireland” searches of the large search engines.

To date, the large search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN have not solved this problem of the missing web. WhoisIreland.com has come a lot closer to solving it. The Ghosthunter algorithm developed to detect these missing hosters has identified 2979 potential Irish micro hosters on US IP space and 1814 potential Irish hosters on UK IP space. In real terms, these figures will drop as the different levels of the algorithm are applied.

Three significant Irish web development companies on UK IP space were identified with 100% accuracy on the first run along with the websites hosted by one of IEDR’s resellers. The size of these Irish micro-hosters varies from a couple of sites hosted to over a hundred sites hosted.

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Written by John McCormac on August 25th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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