Hosting an Australian website from Iceland: ridiculous?

July 9, 2009 8:07 PM

I have my heart set on an .is domain which spells out the name of my Australian website, but I'm restricted to using web hosts registered with the ISNIC (administers the .is gTLD), which means hosting from Iceland/Europe. Should I give up on it? (If not, can you recommend a host?)

A previous question asked about this, but I think the rules on registering an .is domain have changed since 2005, because I can't see any mention on the ISNIC website of requirements for an Icelandic business presence or trademark. I have in fact successfully registered the domain I want to use, somehow managing to have skipped over the bit in the FAQ which points to a list of approved hosts.

For a host to be registered with the ISNIC, they have to conform to the ISNIC's (I think) quite strict technical requirements, pay a modest tariff, and host at least 10 .is domains at any one time. Of course, no Australian host is registered with them.

I read that Icelandic web hosting is meant to be quite cheap because of low energy costs (cheap sustainable geothermal energy, and less cooling necessary), but from the very limited research I've been able to do (Google can't translate Icelandic yet), this doesn't really seem to be the case? Perhaps this only applies 'in bulk' to companies running high-load apps/services and not to hosting relatively humble webpages?

My instant reaction when reading about the hosting requirements was that I had made a mistake, but then most of the websites I regularly visit I suppose are hosted in the US, so maybe it's not completely silly? I can still change the name of the project, but I have my heart set on this name and the .com.au equivalent is taken. I don't expect the website will be drawing huge amounts of traffic any time soon, (say, before the new 1.9 Tbps cable referred to in the Wired article comes online) but I'd like to go with a hosting company that will let me scale up when necessary.

If you don't think I'm being overly sentimental about the name and can read Icelandic, I would be most grateful for host recommendations!

posted by carnival of animals to computers & internet (3 answers total)

I've had macinn.is since earlier this year, DNS hosted with gandi.net, no problems. I just redirect to the same old webhost I've had for a decade, and mail goes to my primary domain.
posted by kcm at 8:36 PM on July 9, 2009

I think you're confusing things. Nowhere does ISNIC talk about web hosts, this is all about DNS servers (as it should be, since web servers are not the only things on the Internet that want names). And AFAICT, you can register your nameservers on the ISNIC web site yourself once your have a .is domain and associated NIC handle. Since it's unlikely you're going to run your own, I presume yours'll already be registered anyway.

DJB's step-by-step on setting up for .is.
posted by themel at 8:58 PM on July 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Ah, I'm glad I was wrong! Thank you both!
posted by carnival of animals at 9:26 PM on July 9, 2009