Browsing with a mobile phone

[workshop]

On Afrihost here workinknysa comes up blank cateringcontacts works

Any idea why? The sites both use Wordpress scripts and both work fine on Telkom. They are hosted on different shared hosting servers in the States. But I can't see that the international routing used by the three ISP's in question is going to be that different. Local infrastructure? proxy servers? beyond my ken and understanding.

[Dave A]

Any idea why? The sites both use Wordpress scripts and both work fine on Telkom. They are hosted on different shared hosting servers in the States.

Meh.

I'd check server loads and status as a starting point. You might want to bookmark those server status pages as you'll probably be visiting them often.

Apart from overseller hosting load issues, there are other problems using shared hosting in the USA for an SA market.

One is daily maintenance routines which tend to run somewhere between midnight and 4.00a.m. based on the server's time clock. Right now that translates to 6.00a.m. to 10.00a.m. in SA. It is highly likely you'll have significant delays, timeouts and service drop-outs such as DNS resolution issues while a maintenance script is running, especially on shared hosting.

The second one is lag, which is aggravated by shaping (prioritisation). This can (and often does) lead to typically non-browser-cached parts of a page loading fast (such as the HTML part), but other parts coming in really slowly (such as large image files and the CSS). CSS in particular can be heavily deprioritised as this is typically "only" downloaded once and then cached in your browser for a while (depending on something called a TTL setting).

And so onto the problem of mobile. Quite simply, many mobile browsers don't cache content well at all.