The Queen's Website : Five Things You May Not Know

The newly unveiled Royal.gov.uk has certainly been the most talked about website in the United Kingdom for the past week with mentions in most media from the BBC to the Sun newspapers, numerous blogs and scores of twitters.

Unbeknown to many are five facts that we've gathered about the Royal.gov.uk website which should be of interest to those willing to lurk behind the scenes of a high profile website which stood in the public limelight for the past 12 years.

Fact 1 : Royal.gov.uk runs on Windows only

Netcraft reports that Royal.gov.uk is being run on a Windows 2003 platform and has migrated to the platform since September 2006. Before this, the site ran on Windows 2000 Server. It shouldn't also come as a surprise that Royal.gov.uk doesn't use Microsoft's ASP web application framework and IIS6. Sorry Open source users, no LAMP here.

Fact 2 : Royal.gov.uk is hosted in America

A quick traceroute shows that the Royal site is hosted by Dedipower in the United States of America, although the company itself is a privately owned and profitable UK company. Dedipower also counts Sony, ITV, the Home Office, Carphone Warehouse and Coca Cola amongst its many customers. The deal was struck through Asuk Creative Limited.