Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise.

Not a good move as it turned out.

Uploading the databases and HTML was very easy and much faster than expected. But nothing worked… it took them a day to find out that they’d not installed the PHP software for me.

Then things seemed to work. In fact, everything worked fine ’til I tried some pages that use encoded characters (for the French e-acute etc.) and none of them worked. That was two days ago and they’ve still not worked out how to fix the problem so I’m now in the process of cancelling the account with them.

Why the different experience? Well, Brooke has been with them for years and up to April 2006 they were one of the best places around so any teething troubles that she may have had were sorted out under the old regime. In 2006 they were taken over by Endurance and from then on the support had rapidly become worse. That’s not reflected (yet) in most of the review sites as they generally take account of all reviews so, of course, most of them predate the 2006 takeover.

Anyway, I’m off to try another place over there now.

Interest rate changes by central banks are peculiar affairs.

For one thing, the banks aren’t actually obliged to respond by lowering interest rates although, usually, they do so by a similar amount. It’s usually a similar amount rather than exactly the same amount though which affects people differently: it’s common for banks to drop interest rates on savings accounts by a little more than the cut the central bank announces and loan rates by no more than is announced.

That sounds like they’re ripping you off, and to some extent they are, but what kicks in is the effect of their own administration on the processing of the loans and savings. Even if the central bank cut rates to zero, there would still be a charge for loans as that represents a risk to the bank, and savings rates would drop to zero or possibly a little below that as obviously there is a cost to processing savings too (they’d probably introduce charges rather than negative interest rates).

High interest products tend to represent higher risks so the rates on those aren’t always cut at all following a rate cut announcement.

And, of course, if you’ve a fixed rate loan then the payments on that will stay the same.

Several years ago I made the move from US based hosting to UK based hosting because of the extra traffic that you tend to get when your site is hosted in the same location as your main customer base.

That particular move worked really well in that I ended up with around 30x (yes, thirty times) the traffic that I’d had on the original American hosting service. That’s with no changes in the website apart from where it was hosted.

Ironically, now I’m looking to move some sites in the opposite direction as they now have more of a global audience than the collection of sites from a few years ago did.

Now, the big question I’m wondering about is whether I’ll get a 30x jump in traffic in going the other direction?

Since it’s St Patrick’s Day, we thought it was a great day to add our entry for Downpatrick on our world guide where, argueably, he’s buried under a massive stone in the chuch graveyard.

Naturally, there’s nothing on over here for St Patrick’s and we were hoping to get over to Dublin for the parades but, yet again, didn’t quite manage it between one thing and another.

As it happens though, by far the largest parade is in New York!

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).