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As you may already be aware Pakistan is now in a state or emergency. I won’t go into the details of this as you can get much more information from the hundred and one blogs and forums covering this. Instead I am going to write about the state of geo’s website www.geo.tv.

Geo TV is of course blocked like all other private news channels. But the website is still accessible and if you visit it you will find that a plain text version of the site is being delivered due to high traffic as everyone tries to find out what is going on in the country.

What is interesting to note is that geo.tv redirects to an ip address 65.36.215.69 . Now why would the geo webmasters be doing this?

There are two possibilities. Either they are trying to avoid possible censorship of the geo.tv domain or they have changed hosting providers and are redirecting users to their new dedicated IP address while DNS propagates. The latter may or may not be the case because if you do an nslookup for geo.tv directly on their current nameservers the IP address provided is actually 209.41.165.180 . It appears to be an attempt to avoid censorship although its a strange way of doing it because IP addresses can be blocked too.

Another interesting thing about their website is that they while they are serving mostly text they are not using gzip compression. Perhaps bandwidth is less of a concern to them than CPU usage.

I guess its true what the experts say – CPU and RAM are more valuable resources than bandwidth.