Financial & Travel Musings

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You wouldn’t think so but in fact it makes a BIG difference.

For example, when I move my websites from hosting in America to hosting in the UK, the traffic within a few weeks the traffic was THIRTY times what it had been before. That’s with no change in the websites and no promotion running ie the only change was the hosting location.

The magnitude of the effect will depend on the content of your website, what promotion you’ve ran on it and how it’s written but it will be noticeable when you move your hosting to/from where your main target audience lives. It’s not always obvious where your site actually is hosted; an easy way to check it is to run www.whois.sc/yourdomainname.com  and scroll down to IP location.

Given the potential magnitude of the difference it can make, it’s well worthwhile running the above check as it’ll only take you a few minutes.

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Once you’ve more than a few websites on the go it’s often the case that the webspace gets very messy.

It doesn’t need to be like that as you can group websites with a common theme in a single folder. In some cases, you may even be able to point a number of domains at the same folder and separate out the content using an htaccess file.

Unless you do this at the outset it can take quite a bit of time doing the downloading and uploading necessary to implement the new arrangement of folders for your webspace ie it’s best to think ahead or perhaps make the change when you’re changing your hosting service.

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Whilst it’s great to have software that’s free and sometimes it’s quite excellent software one problem is that sometimes the business of upgrading it from one version to the next is a major pain.

For example, I wanted to do something really simple which was to move my blogs from one hosting service to another. It should have been a matter of backing up the Wordpress content on the old service, installing the software on the new one then restoring the backup. Well, that worked OK apart from the fact that I couldn’t amend any of the old entries and whenever I tried to post anything that contained a link it dropped me right out of the software.

There were several solutions proposed on the Wordpress support forum mainly involving the character set and its interaction with MySQL. None of them worked and it’s taken me over a month to find the real solution which involves adding a small htaccess file to the setup.

To be fair, paid for software often doesn’t have a sensible support option either and indeed I still await Microsoft to come up with a fix that’ll let me use Outlook 2003 on Vista. That’s probably the best example of really poor software testing that there’s been in recent times. Quite how they overlooked that Outlook 2003 just wouldn’t work on Vista is beyond me unless they just wanted to force everyone to upgrade to the pretty much incompatible Office 2007.

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