A Time of Magic

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Whilst there appear to be hundreds if not thousands of different Wordpress themes around these days in fact when you look at them in detail quite a lot are fairly simple variations of a single theme.

Take the SevaTeem theme that we’re using here at the moment. It looks pretty different from the theme over at Our Inns and yet the only two changes between the two are that this one uses white text instead of black and the background is different.

SevaTeem is the theme that I’m developing over at SevaTeem and which I’ve been rolling out on a few of my sites to see how it runs before I release it on an unsuspecting world

For various reasons we’re changing the hosting service that we’re using for the websites and the blogs.

The websites were fairly easy to move over though a little time consuming as one of them has several thousand photographs on it which makes for a very, very long time to copy over.

Move onto the blogs though and it’s been nothing but hassle from the start. First off we moved a couple of small ones over and everything seemed fine for a few days ’til we tried to amend one of the old posts and just couldn’t do it at all. That particular problem took a couple of months to get to the bottom of and it’s only within the last few days that we’ve solved it.

One big plus point of the move is that the new hosting service is a good deal faster and because of its location should bring us a lot more hits on the sites too.

At just about every turn you find people that are looking for evidence that aliens are amongst us, but there seem to be a great deal fewer people looking for time evidence of time travellers even though one would think they’d be easier to find.

Where (or when) would you look though? The problem in identifying them is that, as we’ve discussed here before, it would be far from easy to pick them out whilst they were in our time period. There’s all kinds of reasons for that but boiling down to the fact that they’d be unlikely to have as detailed a knowledge of events in our period as would be required for them to be able to prove that they were from the future. It would be small things that would identify them and they’d be quite hard to pick out: a different way of phrasing things (but then that could just be because they were from another country), a different way of dressing (if you’ve looked in the highstreet lately you might come to the conclusion that everyone was from the future!) or different expectations (like not understanding why you had to dial a phone number instead of just asking for the person perhaps?).

However, we should be able to pick them out from the past if we narrow down the time period and look very carefully.

In that respect, perhaps the best event to consider is the sinking of the Titanic. It’s something that’s become very well known in our own time and because it sets so many precedents (eg lifeboats for everyone, manning the radio 24/7, etc.) it may remain sufficiently attractive right through to the time when someone builds a time machine. The other attraction for a potential time traveller is that it’s been very well researched so they’d know pretty much exactly where to go to see the various events and even where they needed to be to be amongst those rescued.

That last point is quite critical. If we assume that the time machine itself would need to go into the past then they would need to be amongst the survivors. Naturally, if the time machine didn’t need to go into the past then this wouldn’t apply but let’s be optimistic and assume that it needed to for now.

Think about it: this means that there’s a good chance that at least one of those survivors was from the future.

Thanks to the sheer volume of information available, it might even be possible to identify them too. What you’re looking for is someone on their own (ie exclude anyone with family on the ship or who subsequently returned to family in Europe), who wasn’t famous and who disappeared after they were rescued. An impossible task? I don’t think so: the Encyclopedia Titanica contains biographic details on all of the survivors so, in principle, it’s just a matter of working through the 712 survivors to identify the time traveller.

It’s probably something that many online businesses dream of but are you actually geared up to cope with the knock-on consequences if your business really took off by growing, say 10 fold, 100 fold, perhaps 1000 fold?

Realistically I suspect that most places aren’t expecting to grow quite that much and therefore never consider the consequences if somehow they did.

The first problems are likely to come when you grow around 10 to 100 fold in that you’ll find that you can’t simply keep upgrading the bandwidth of your hosting service anymore and hit the limit of the shared hosting services that most people use. Beyond that, the price jumps somewhat but the service levels available jump even more once you move into VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and find that instead of sharing the server with several hundred other users that there’s only a handful of others thus the speed of response of your website jumps quite dramatically. The jump upwards to dedicated hosting need not be any more difficult but it does open the door to running the server as though it were just sitting on your desk.

However, that does assume that your software can actually cope with that level of growth. For example, have you allowed for tens of thousands of customers instead of merely hundreds in your customer reference number? Many places find that such problems kick in suddenly and dramatically. If, say, your products are initially targetted at country areas you could find that you’ve a builtin assumption that there would never be more than 1000 customers in a given area. Fine for the country, but what if you start moving into metropolitan areas and find that you have more than 1000 customers in a single area but only three digits to refer to them?

Finally, don’t forget that as your customer base grows, so too do the number of “awkward” customers who’d like you to change things to suit them. Without a flexible system, you could find that you can’t deal with them at all.

The Northern Rock mortgage bank got itself into trouble by expanding much faster than it’s deposits and thereby needing to go to the wholesale markets to borrow more money to fund it’s mortgages.

Quite ridulously it ended up taking almost 20% of the entire UK mortgage market in the first half of 2007 by doing this which is pretty amazing considering that it’s far from being a large mortgage bank. Naturally, that rapid growth was a sure sign of problems ahead and just two months after making that announcement the bank made another one saying that it was in trouble.

With such a large customer base, the government were forced to intervene to support the bank, to the tune of £25 billion ($50 billion!) which is around $2000 for each family in the country.

Naturally, they want their money back but that’s not so simple. Yes, the bank has assets behind it but those assets are mortgages and not realistically useable to get cash directly anytime soon. Therefore, all kinds of financial engineering projects have been proposed to get the bank back on an even keel. Unfortunately, nobody wants to cover that £25 billion so the government has just proposed the sale of £25 billion of bonds to fund it.

Great, but… who would buy £25 billion of bonds from a bust bank? Well, actually, the government would or rather it will back the bonds with a guarantee which amounts to the same thing. Doesn’t that mean that the government is still out £25 billion. Emm, yes, it does.

In the fight against online fraud, the latest weapon being added to the banking arsenal is the card reader.

This is a little gadget that you’ll soon get from your bank which you use by inserting your card, entering your PIN and then quoting the code number that is generated when you’re making an online purchase. Sensibly enough the first banks to introduce it are providing it free to their customers but I’m sure that’ll change.

How useful it will be remains to be seen. If you make a lot of online transactions then clearly you’ll end up using it a lot and presumably will at least remember where you put the thing when you need it for your latest purchase. Whether those of us who make online purchases relatively rarely will remember where it is and whether the batteries will still be OK when we find it is quite another matter.

That’s far from the greatest problem though. The technology requires that you have a chip on your card (and a very new one at that) which therefore means that it can’t currently be used for sites based in America which, of course, is the largest source of online retailers in the world in that chip cards aren’t currently being issued there.

A technology looking for a problem? I suspect it will turn out to be just that.

Insurance is a peculiar product when you think about it.

Effectively the insurance company are betting that they can charge you more than you will cost them. Given that there are lots of insurance companies around in the various insurance markets, competitive forces act to keep them from charging you over the odds to take the “bet” ie your insurance premium but that conflict of interest between you and them still remains.

Many people take account of this conflict in interest and self-insure when the option is available to them. In the long term, it may be cheaper for you to do that (ie pay out for whatever claims might have arisen) especially when the government adds taxes to your insurance premiums and thereby loads the dice even more against you. Another very viable option is to increase the amount of “excess” that you’re prepared to pay before the insurance kicks in which is particularly popular with health insurance. For example, whilst a normal health insurance contract will pay out everything but the first $100 or so of a claim, some insurance companies let you increase your personal payment up to $5000 which means that you’ll pay for the small things yourself but they’ll end up picking up the tab for the biggies such as heart surgery and so on.

However, in a number of key areas self-insurance is illegal, notably in car insurance but also in some countries for health insurance too. Since it’s illegal not to insure in these areas, competitive forces are reduced and thereby you end up paying more or receiving less than you would do otherwise. However, whenever an accident occurs you’re immediately in conflict with your insurer as clearly you want the maximum payout whilst they want the minimum one. To counteract this, “independent” assesors to place a value on your car after an accident but that independence is limited in that the insurance company both selects them and pays their fees so clearly there are downward pressures on any estimate that they might come up with.

For example, take a car bought for $10,000 that’s written off two years later in an accident. Typically, a used car of similar age could be bought for around $5000 but the typical payout offered is more like $3000 after you take account of the deductible (ie the amount you pay before the insurance kicks in).

Perhaps the most ignored aspect of running a website is where it’s actually hosted.

For many people, that’ll be in America simply because most hosting sites that come up when you search are there. However, that’s not always the best place to host your site.

Surely it doesn’t matter? Most people think that but then they’re wrong. Google and other search engines take into account the location of your hosting when they serve up search results. So, for example, if your site is hosted in America and an identical site is hosted in the UK then the UK site will come up ahead of yours on searches performed in the UK or using google.co.uk .

As an example of how significant this effect is in terms of site traffic, we originally hosted our European targetted travel sites in America. On moving them to a European hosting service, the site traffic went up 10 fold within a few weeks even though the only change we made was to change the hosting service. We’ve since moved them to a UK based hosting service and the traffic is around three times that which we had on the European host ie in total moving from the US to the UK meant a 30 fold increase in traffic.

Although these days you can tell google where the major market is (via google’s webmaster tools) you can’t tell the other search engines therefore it’s still worthwhile to have your hosting in the country of your major target audience.

One of the great things about the Internet is that the software is usually scaleable ie you can run with 1000 visitors per day on your website just as easily as you can with 10.

Well, most of the time that’s true. What you’ll find though is that you start needing to upgrade your hosting package as the business grows. That’s not a problem though for reasonable growth and, for example, we expect to have to upgrade our own hosting package once a year usually. What we’d not allowed for was the effect of a few seemingly minor changes in our promotion efforts over the past year kicking in with a vengeance and lifting our site traffic around 20 fold within a few weeks.

Even that growth rate wasn’t a problem but it required us to upgrade our hosting package three times in three successive weeks to catch up with the growth in traffic on the sites. Now, that’s not a problem in that the software is scaleable but what it has done is to move us to the top option on shared hosting which means that after the next upgrade we’ll have to start looking at VPS hosting which is much more expensive. That extra expense is down to the much lower number of other users on the server: instead of hundreds, it’ll be about 4 or 5. Obviously, that’ll improve the speed of our sites somewhat and I suspect that may well mean that I’ll need to upgrade almost immediately afterwards.

So although you can usually cope with quite substantial growth in the traffic on your sites with no problem other than needing to upgrade the hosting now and again, it’s as well to look a few upgrades ahead in case you run off the end of potential upgrades on your existing path. Ultimately of course you can go to a dedicated server but you might want to consider hiring a professional to look after your sites by the time you get to that point.

With the “click once to execute” culture that many people are increasingly settling into, it’s perhaps not surprising that they assume that the click is followed by instant action behind the scenes.

How many of us have clicked “complete order” and assume that someone in Amazon is immediately going to run along the shelves in the warehouse and start picking out the books for their order? Sometimes that may happen but I suspect that it’s very rare indeed for someone to be sitting there as your order comes in and immediately start collecting the books for it.

In our own case, we generally pick up reservations in the morning but that doesn’t stop people clicking “book now” and phoning within a few minutes to confirm that we’ve received the booking. It’s getting worse too. One interesting development that seems sure to grow is having someone book a room from their car and arrive within a few minutes. Quite why they bother to book online from a car that’s only a few minutes away is beyond me but it happened a couple of times last summer.

Surely people haven’t parted so much with reality that they think that everything behind the click is automated?