Foreign Perspectives

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When this first became available I figured that mobile broadband was going to be one of those products that received loads of promotion but was actually used by very few people in practice.

But, it’s turned out that’s not the case and increasing numbers of people are finding it rather useful. For example, we’re finding that a surprising number of people are using it to book accommodation while they’re actually on holiday. That might sound crazy but this coming weekend is one of the busiest in Europe and taking the chance that you’ll find accommodation on Friday night is just asking for trouble so rather than take that chance people are checking out the accommodation listing sites during the day and booking online.

Not only that, but you can often avoid lugging around a large out of date guidebook and look up the places you’re going to online which I’m sure is even more popular if less visible from our end.

So don’t be surprised when you find you’re using it yourself!

Popularity: 24% [?]

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It’s such a thankless task, isn’t it?

There seem to be thousands of hosting services out there and really not that much to distinguish between them when you start comparing what they offer. These days, you can pretty much take it as read that you’ll have more storage capacity and bandwidth than you’ll ever need on even the lowest rung of the plans.

However, webhosting top 10 lists can be a big help with this. Sadly, none of them are perfect but that’s not the fault of the review sites but rather down to the constantly changing offerings of the hosting companies themselves. For example, you get dot5hosting.com quoted as being “the WORST ever” and “excellent” which basically reflects a change to the worse that happened fairly recently. Slightly worryingly for me, hostgator don’t seem to figure in any of the recent top 10s despite topping them not so long ago.

What’s useful too is categories within the top 10s. Clearly if you’re wanting budget priced hosting what may be a top 10 for you will be entirely different than if you were shooting for top of the line service as your selection criteria.

Don’t forget that you’re not tied to your existing hosting service so don’t put up with bad service from them.

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You’d think that when they were placing an advert for their holiday property they’d at least read what country it was in, wouldn’t you?

Surprisingly, an increasing number of people these days don’t seem to read anything before they click. For example, this morning I’d a submission to our holiday listings site for a property. Snag was that it was listed as a “for sale” property rather than a holiday one, as being in the French language when it was in English and as not being in France. It seems doubtful that they actually read what they were typing for that one.

To get the process as clean as possible, the main input form for the properties contains information about what should be in every section and yet even there it’s frequently ignored. For instance, whilst we’ve a section that’s for use in sending comments or additional information to me and isn’t published, I very often find that it contains essential information about the property.

Maybe now you’ll understand why some of the large listings sites have adverts that are in very dodgy English!

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