overseas sites

[AZZenny]

I tend to cruise a lot of foreign websites, esp Middle-Eastern. I often have an incredibly hard time trying to load and open websites -- whether commercial or governmental -- despite having a very quick high speed connection. Occasionally it almost seems like a whole country is down, but it's been harder and harder to open shopping sites and news sites and things like that; If they do open, even if I've been there before successfully I find myself getting frozen or dropped more often.

Also, commenting on overseas blogs -- even those totally in English -- gets me timed out almost every time I try.

Is this commonplace, is it the fact that yes, I do use aol, or is it me?

 

[Pariah]

I suspect AOL and foreign sites probably don't mix well, but the definitive answer will surely come from an ASFN techie.

 

[jw7]

First off, I hate AOL. They use a proxy server architecture meaning they constantly swap the servers you post from instead of having a static IP addy.

That said, if you have no problem seeing US sites, then it is probably the overseas site. I would ask someone on Cox or Qwest to go to the site in question and see if they have the same problem. That will isolate the cause to either the overseas site or your ISP.

 

[AZZenny]

OK, that helped. I actually have QWest VDSL just never use it as the primary browser -- yeah, I know, I know. Some of the recently inaccessible sites did just open right up, and NONE of the freeze-up or keep getting rebooted to the login page nonsense. Another site I wanted to access to buy some fine Israeli chocolate (Max Brenner) still won't load, though, so it must be the site.

So much of it is aol, but not all. Good to know.

 

[Chaz]

What Bob said.

Then there is this:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

 

[AZZenny]

That's neat. But most of the Middle East isn't listed. I'll assume it's somewhere between Europe and Asia.

I also have to wonder if some of the commercial websites in English are tended on smaller businesses where its clearly a sideline.

When the website starts to load and you get ?????? on the active title bar, I know that means foreign language but that shouldn't make it not come up at all. Interesting that aol doesn't just translate many other scripts, but it looks like msn does automatically. Which is no help if you can't read it anyhow, but interesting.