Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago you needed to buy a router to go along with your Internet connection so you’d be considering the advantages of a Linksys router over a Netgear router.

These days it’s quite different as most of the time you get the router along with the Internet connection. You still have the choice of using a different router though and even though that would mean paying for something that you’ve gotten for free there are advantages in doing so sometimes.

For one thing, standalone routes generally have loads more facilities than the freebie router you’ll get. Thus you can block inappropriate sites from your kids for example, or limit the amount of bandwidth that they’re grabbing with their online game or whatever. Moreover you can install more protection software for your computer.

So it’s worth at least considering alternatives to that freebie.

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Since it’s very much an online thing there’s loads and loads of information around as to where to host your website but, as usual, most of it omits really basic information that you’d like to know.

When you start looking around at website hosting you probably won’t even notice those information gaps and it’s really only after you’ve chosen a hosting service that you find that there’s some information that you’d have liked to have known ahead of time. For instance, there’s a surprising number of comparison sites that don’t bother to mention whether or not there’s a “control panel” interface. That’s important as, when (and it will generally be when rather than if) you want to move your sites to another host, it’s a whole lot easier if they’re running control panel.

Almost always omitted is where the hosting is located. That’s basically because the majority of comparison sites are based in the US and don’t even think of the implications of people from outside the US using a hosting service. In fact, there’s a major difference: courtesy of how google’s geographic system works it’s much better to have your site hosted in the country where your customers are based. In one case, I’ve seen a 30 fold difference in site hits on moving from a US based hosting service to a UK based one where the customers where mainly based in the UK. Even within the US this could potentially have implications for you where your site was hosted on the east coast but your customers were on the west coast.

So, think not just who your site is hosted with but where it will be.

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Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?

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