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Hi Phil From an SEO standpoint and in an ideal world, dealing with localisation issues, it would be preferred to have each country specific site hosted within that particular country. But this throws up additional hosting cost as well as individual link building efforts to each of those domains. The best way would be to redirect any country specific versions of the domain to the relevant root folder. For example, if we were to launch hurco in Italy, the preference would be to place the Italian content within a subfolder (i.e. http://www.hurco.com/it/) but also purchase http://www.hurco.it and use a 301 redirect the site to the Italian subfolder. This is done both to preserve your brand assets in other countries and markets, but also to avoid any confusion should a user mistakenly remember your brand but not your site. The subfolders or portions of the website can be targeted to the local market by way of designation within Google Webmaster Tools.