In Czech, ch is one letter and it comes after h. Sort a directory by byte order and you produce an alphabet no Czech reader recognises.
Czech alphabetisation differs from byte order in ways that are invisible in English and glaring in Czech.
ch is a single letter positioned after h, and accented letters have their own places. Listings are sorted with Czech collation rather than by character codes.
Member lists, product indexes and glossaries are the places this shows. A reader scanning for a name gives up when the order is wrong rather than reporting it.
Czech carries háčky and the acute accent, and people omit them when typing. Matching folds them while display keeps them.
Storage stays in the EU with the location named, and delivery is close enough that latency is not a consideration.
The classic way Czech text breaks is a database dump that assumed a Latin-1 default, discovered after the switch.
A wrong sort order is not an error message. It is a list that feels subtly unusable, and visitors abandon it rather than explaining why.
A Czech listing can render instantly and still be unusable, because the sequence is one no reader was taught.
The distinguishing work is collation, which affects ordering rather than matching.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sort collation | Czech rules applied wherever content is ordered alphabetically | ch is a single letter placed after h and accented letters have their own positions, so byte-order sorting produces a sequence no Czech reader recognises. |
| Directory ordering | Applied to member lists, indexes and glossaries | Those are the pages people scan rather than search, and a wrong order makes them quietly unusable instead of visibly broken. |
| Accent folding | Applied for matching while preserved for display | Czech diacritics are frequently omitted when typing, so strict matching fails against correctly spelled content. |
| Migration encoding | Character set preserved explicitly during transfer | A dump assuming a Latin-1 default turns Czech text into mojibake, and it is noticed only after the switch. |
| Origin placement | EU, close to the domestic market | The country is central and well connected, so latency and residency are answered by the same nearby origin. |
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Move the site to an EU origin — migration is free, collation configured.