2oceansvibe raked in several awards at the 2009 SA Blog Awards, including SA’s best overall blog, best entertainment and most humorous – to name but a few. It also boasts rather impressive stats like 50,000 unique readers and 200,000 page views per month. Not too bad, considering the guy’s mantra is “work is a sideline, live the holiday.”

Seth decided to move over to us when his previous hosting providers conducted an upgrade to their hosting infrastructure. Unfortunately, their desired results didn’t quite materialise, and instead caused the 2oceansvibe site to go down. Our RSAWEB Geeks quickly worked their magic to fix the site. We took a snapshot of the site (all files and database), pulled a copy of the broken site, and stitched it all together with the backup to re-build the site on our hosting server. All this was done in a matter of 2 days, with minimal interruption and no downtime to the 2oceansvibe site.

Seth thought this was awesome, and then moved all the domains for his site over to us – “RSAWEB did a great job fixing up my site when I needed it most. Thanks for keeping the good vibes flowing!”

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RSAWEB hosts 2oceansvibe – SA’s most popular blog!

We are very proud to announce the launch and immediate availability of True Cloud Servers – a cloud hosting platform that allows users to deploy and provision fully operational servers in just seconds. The first of its kind in South Africa, True Cloud Servers offer benefits previously unavailable to businesses hosting locally.

There are 2 key differences between our True Cloud Servers and currently competing products: (1) The speed at which servers can be deployed and provisioned; and (2) the flexibility and scalability of any given solution. The business benefits of this product explained in further detail on our website.

With True Cloud Servers new servers can be up and running in minutes, and new server resources allocated on-demand to cater for resource hungry applications or sudden website traffic spikes. This is the next evolution in hosting…. Hardware as a Service.

The technology behind True Cloud Servers allows for flexible control of server resources through the use of Cloud Nodes. Users can maintain optimal server conditions by adding resources from Cloud Nodes whenever they lack CPU, memory or other server resources. These resources can also be controlled on a day-to-day basis, as the demands placed on the server change. Users only purchase the resources they need, and only pay for what’s provisioned.

As with traditional server offerings, True Cloud Servers give the user complete control with full administrator access to their server, allowing them to select their choice operating system, applications and configuration.

A key factor for business who may consider using cloud services is the recent increase in available bandwidth and the resulting decrease in the costs thereof. This makes True Cloud Servers a viable option for businesses that need to host locally.

With regards to potential security concerns in the Cloud, users have nothing to fear. We, as the Service Provider, do not have access to any of our customers’ servers; each server is independent of the others in the Cloud. Organisations like Google and the UK Government are already utilising similar hosting platforms with great success.

True Cloud Servers are available in 256MB (@ R256 p/m), 512MB (@ R395 p/m), 1G (@ R695 p/m), 2G (@ R995 p/m) and 4G (@ R1,495 p/m), and setup for all of these options are free. Find out more about our packages here.

Curious about this new product? Try it out risk free with our free trial offer.

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A Cloud Hosting first for SA

Those with foresight can book or ‘park’ their desired domains, so that they can own the domain without having to pay the monthly hosting costs while they are not using it. This can prove useful if you have an idea for a blog/business/ecommerce site, and want to secure a domain name ahead of time or even if you see a particular domain that will become valuable to you in the future.

Parking a domain with RSAWEB is easy and cost effective. All you pay for is the annual domain registration cost, and parking fee of R25 per annum. So for example, if you wanted to park www.thisismysupernewdomain.co.za, it would cost you R50 per annum for the registration and R25 for the parking – a total cost of R75 per annum (R6.25 per month). When you want to start using your domain, simply order a web hosting package, and you’re ready to go live.

Ready to get parking?
Check if the domain you want to purchase is available using our domain search tool.

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How to park a domain name

Getting heard above all the noise on the web is becoming harder. The old mantra of, “build it and they will come” certainly does hold true on the web in many cases. There are many obvious success stories of this, ala Google, but as more of your competitors or even other websites compete for your customers eyeballs, standing out of the crowd is what you need to get right.

What is certainly true for all sites/products/services on the web is that information is king. He (or she) who holds the data and presents it in the most useful/usable format normally wins. Data can come in multiple forms: text, images, video, maps, news etc and can be presented in multiple formats: blogs, news sites, Facebook, Twitter, email, newsletter, etc.

So, how do you become successful?

1. Be interesting
Ego plays a massive part in developing a good web presence. Tell your visitors that you are good. A good way to do this with industry recognition, testimonials from customers etc.

So to stroke your ego, get connected on Twitter & Facebook and talk about yourself, your product and your site. Build up your network of followers to some decent numbers and compare yourself against your competition. Entice customers & new Twitter followers with interesting campaigns, maybe do a product discount when you increase your twitter followers to 100 (for newbies) or up it by 10% or some other strategic number.

2. KISS – Keep it simple stupid
Simplicity and usability are two of the most important factors on the web. It’s one thing having great data, but if your delivery mechanism isn’t good, it’s worth nothing. Change things slowly, introduce new concepts and see how they perform. Are you getting more visitor traffic through a new page or menu item you created since last week?

3. If you can’t measure it, how can you manage it?
Tracking is one of those vital feedback mechanisms. You need to know how people are getting to your site, what they are searching for, how long they stayed for, how many pages they viewed etc. (you need to track this via Google Analytics)

Analytics provides a FREE & amazingly powerful tool to track your users. You can also track ‘conversions’ and evaluate how these customers got to your site. Conversions can be a specific page view, like a contact form submission or a newsletter signup or even a product order.

4. Build, release. FAST (for online applications)
If your development cycle is months, by the time you have finished building it, is your product even going to suite the users? Taking a lesson from the Agile/Scrum approach to development, build something quickly and release it. Get user feedback comments and see if they like it. Customers know what they want, you can make an educated guess, but that’s exactly it, a guess. Stop guessing, release new features quickly, take a features poll from users and stop trying to understand the customers needs, get them to tell you what THEY want. Decide, build, release, get feedback, reiterate. (in 1-2 months cycles max)

5. Leverage your user base
Engage your users on Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications. Happy users are great promoters of your products. If you are selling something, create an affiliate marketing program, giving them a % of the revenue from the sale. The power of Twitter and other social media allows interesting products/services to go viral. When a new user signs up, encourage them to follow you on twitter. Possibly offer new features in advance to users that ‘retweet’ your message to their friends (this is a great way to get followers)

6. Offline Actions
The biggest debate always revolves around what offline actions one should take. Talk to as many people as possible about your product/service. Get networking, attend conferences, get invited to speak at conferences (this happens when you become the ‘expert’ in your field) and tell friends & family. Be passionate.

7. The bigger picture
Don’t expect overnight success, all these things take time to get right. Quality content & good presentation is the key, the more useful information presented in a good format, the more success you can expect to have.

Summing up
We often see companies advertising “Get listed on Google” or some other marketing tool, used to entice customers to signup for a website or web hosting, don’t be tempted, if it actually worked, everyone would be using it (even us and we don’t!). Customers also get a website built by someone else and then wonder why they don’t get any visitors.

Realistically it’s all about your content and who links to your content. Be interesting, put some effort into marketing your website and people will come, be boring and people won’t. Google Adwords is also the fastest way to get your website out there (you pay money for people clicking on adverts).

Read up on SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) – start implementing these strategies, they do require a lot of time and energy, but they do really work.

Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour

Making a success out of your website

Securing WordPress has become a major challenge, it is certainly true that WordPress’s success is it’s Achilles heel. As new bugs/hacks are discovered, hackers, spammers and the like are quick to pounce on these opportunities to infect blogs with rubbish content and junky backlinks. Securing your WordPress based site is a crucial step to keeping your site online, your traffic flowing to it and protecting that all important Google ranking. (Google will penalise you for link to spam.)

Keep WordPress updated
Simple yet extremely effective. Updating WordPress is usually really simple. The WordPress guys have made it as simple as possible, there is an auto upgrade function built into WordPress, which makes it ultra simple. A word of caution, if you have hacked the WordPress code, your task just got massively harder. So my advice –> don’t. Keep it simple.

WordPress plugins
Definitely keep these updated. WordPress plugins do have security flaws from time to time. Rather keep them updated, again via a simple upgrade in your plugins manager.

Secure WordPress
There are some nifty plugins that can help you secure WordPress that are easy to install and work like a charm. Secure WordPress plugin

Secure your passwords
For heaven’s sake, why did you make that password for your admin user ‘password’ when you reset it? This is the easiest trick in the book, its called a brute force attack and a cracker will simply keep testing your admin or other users passwords, its just a matter of time. Make sure you use long passwords with multiple characters. Then install this: Login lockdown plugin.

Remove the WordPress version string in your theme
This prevents hackers seeing which version of WordPress you are running. This makes it harder for them to determine where they should start attacking your site. This and other smaller but very useful tweaks can be done easily by installing the WP-Security-Scan plugin.

Server Security – Intelligent blocking
This is harder to achieve if you don’t actually own or manage the server. Modsecurity is a great plugin for the apache web server and there are specific rules that can be added to your apache config to protect it even further. ModSecurity is a module for open source web servers, like apache, that acts like a detector & firewall. It works by providing protection from a wide range of typical attacks against web applications on a web server (like WordPress). For RSAWEB Hosting customers, speak to us for help around this.

For top-class WordPress Web Hosting go and check out RSAWEB. Anything from a small WordPress site to  super-large WordPress sites are catered for.

Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour

Making your wordpress website secure

WordPress plugins can add awesome functionality to your blog without writing a single line of ‘code’. In this tutorial, we discuss which plugins we find useful and which ones we think can add value to your website.

To find and install any of these plugins, login to your wordpress admin panel and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’, type in the plugin name below and click ‘Install’ – you may need to configure the plugin thereafter, most of the time this is done in the admin panel.

Gravatars
Gravatars are a great way to bring interactivity to the comments section of your posts. The Gravatars plugin gives your comments personalisation. The Gravatar service is one that users upload a photo once and it will be retrieved if they comment on your site or other sites and the photo will be displayed. Many of your visitors may already have a Gravatar. It’s a simple easy way to identify users and a great way for you to have a profile picture that interacts with your users when you comment.

Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps assist search engines by making content easier to find, by generating an XML sitemap that all major search engines can view. Sitemaps give your site additional visibility that other competing websites probably won’t have. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is generated and Google is notified of your new page. This is definitely a must have.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the de facto standard now for evaluating your website’s traffic. This essential tool shows you all sorts of data. Learning to interpret it can take your website from good to great. Installing this plugin means you don’t have to go and fiddle the code manually to add Google Analytics tracking code into your theme.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This nifty dashboard plugin shows you your visitor statistics on your WordPress admin dashboard. This gives you a quick overview to how many visitors you are receiving and other interesting stats without having to login to Google Analytics.

WordPress Caching with Hypercache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your WordPress site is installed on to do less work. We have typically seen on busy WordPress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved.

Don’t use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing WordPress sites less.

Akismet Antispam
This antispam plugin works wonders for spammers trying to post rubbish in your comments section. You will need to get a WordPress API key – very simple, its free and all you need to do is  insert it into the settings of the Akismet plugin in WordPress. Don’t worry, you can do all this via the WordPress Admin panel.

WordPress Database Backup
A simple plugin that backs up your valuable website. Once installed, you can backup your websites database and download it via FTP from an RSAWEB Web Hosting or get it emailed to an address (not always guaranteed to work due to the large potential size) actually a backup happens whenever you do anything major. It’s always better to be safe.

All in One SEO Pack
This enables your website to have proper ‘Title’ tags – this makes Google like your site more, its more descriptive (see the blue bar at the top of the window? That’s the ‘title bar’) and its essential to have good Search Engine Optimisation.

Subscribe to comments
Also a definite for websites/blogs that want to allow comments on articles. This allows a user to leave a comment and get notified of a reply. Eliminating the need for them to return to check the page to see if someone has replied. A definite must.

Conclusion
We regularly use these plugins and there are many different variants of some of these plugins. They will greatly improve your ability to manage your WordPress site and make it more appealing to the end user. All the plugins above can be installed directly from the WordPress Admin interface by going to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’ and then searching for the name as they appear above.

How is your wordpress experience going? Post a comment about it and tell us which plugins you like. What other plugins do you want to see mentioned in this list?

For WordPress Web Hosting check us out.

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Pimp your wordpress website with plugins

Themes allow you to easily extend your WordPress based website or blog and make it look good. The advantages of using a pre-built theme are endless, some of which being time and cost. Choose a theme, upload it, tweak it a bit and you’re ready to roll.

Theme providers like Woothemes and OboxDesign allow you download pre-built themes at a superlow cost and they even allow you to reuse them. Doing design for a traditional website can cost you thousands, but using a pre-built theme will either cost you nothing or for the more sexier themes anything from $30-$100. The three themes below are examples of wordpress templates.

Key points to consider before choosing a theme:

1. Layout – people are using fairly standard layouts to navigating the web, look at the templates, they work. Dont go for anything outlandish, your users wont wont be able to navigate your site
2. Flash – websites built exclusively in flash are a disaster. Google and Bing will never find you. What’s the point of building a site if nobody can find it? That’s like having a postal address without a post code.
3. Clutter – don’t load every wordpress widget you can find, make sure the menu structure works nicely, only use ones that are essential.

Installing your custom template:

1. Get your theme (pay or not) and download it to your computer. It usually comes as a zip file (that’s fine)
2. Login to your WordPress Admin
3. Go to “Appearance” and “Add new themes” (red marker 1)



4. Click the ‘Upload’ button (marker 2)
5. Click ‘Browse’ and find your theme file (where you downloaded it to)
6. Click ‘Install Now’
7. If you are asked, please enter the FTP connection info and the hostname is your websites name eg. www.blognow.co.za (your FTP account details that came with your hosting account – For RSAWEB Customers –> you can get them from the webhosting section in the MyRSAWEB Control Panel)



8. It may take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then click ‘Activate’



9. Your theme is now installed! Check it out by going to your website. The www.Blognow.co.za demo looks like this:



10. Go and test out the new theme, add some content!

Look out for the next in the series of the “RSAWEB WordPress Tutorial Series 101” – you can follow us on Twitter or signup to receive emails when a new release is announced

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Easy ways to make your wordpress site look world class with themes

Creating your first website or blog using WordPress can be quite a daunting task. Most people have in the past chosen to fully outsource their website and most probably still need to. Websites have evolved and many more people are launching their own personal and business blogs. WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging tools that can now easily be installed on your web hosting using the WordPress auto-installer we have developed in our MyRSAWeb control panel.

WordPress while primarily designed as blogging software can be used to build far more than a standard blog. We often see our clients hosting incredibly elaborate websites that have been built on WordPress. The Content Management System at the core of the software allows you to easily update website content and embed rich media like videos and photo’s easily via a web interface.

You can install wordpress manually or  you can signup for a business web hosting package with RSAWEB and install WordPress automatically from the MyRSAWEB control panel. This makes creating your site ultra simple without having to FTP or manually edit settings in random files. For the inexperienced user, we recommend this option to get you started.

How to install WordPress with RSAWEB:

1. Order a Linux Business Hosting package
2. Wait for the confirmation email from RSAWEB
3. Login to the www.myrsaweb.co.za control panel
4. Go to “Webhosting Services” and click on your new website
5. Click ‘WordPress’, fill in the details and click ‘Install’
6. Your site should be up and running! Go and check it out http://www.yoursitename.co.za – dont worry it probably wont look like much until you  enter in some content.



7. Now go to http://www.yoursitename.co.za/wp-admin/ and login. You will see the control panel (like below)



8. Create some new ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ and see what it looks like on your site.
9. Thats it! You now have a wordpress website up and running!

You will probably not be happy with the look of the site as its the basic WordPress default template. WordPress can be themed and skinned to your hearts content to get your website to look the way you want it. The next article in this series will tackle the design aspects of WordPress and help you make your website look amazing without the need for advanced design skills!

Manual WordPress Install
Installing WordPress manually can be a challenge and should only be attempted by those with a understanding of basic web development. If you want to do attempt the manual install yourself  this article will help.

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How to setup your first website using wordpress

WordPress is an easy to use website management system and also happens to be one of the most popular blogging platforms available out there.

Over the next few weeks we will be discussing WordPress, how to set up your own blog, as well as posting our thoughts and advice on how to get the most out of WordPress on a budget. Whether creating a large, high volume WordPress site or your average smaller site, the following tutorials will definitely assist you.

Topics include:

1. Setup – How to setup your first website/blog using WordPress
2. Design – Easy ways to make your WordPress site look world class with themes
3. Plugins – Pimp your wordpress website with plugins
4. WordPress Security – securing your site
5. Make a success out of your website

This series should put you on the right path to building a successful website and possibly even a sustainable business. WordPress isn’t for everyone, and although RSAWEB uses an alternative, Joomla for our main site due to the finer control it provides, our blog is a WordPress designed site.

That said WordPress is an awesome tool and always worth using.

Please let us know if you would like to see any further topics and subscribe to our twitter feed at http://twitter.com/RSAWEB to receive updates about any new posts. Click on the ‘Get Updates’ and ‘Get Tweets’ icons on the right to follow this series. RSAWEB offers WordPress Hosting with any Linux Business or larger package as an “Easy Install” option.

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WordPress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website

Virtualisation in the context of hosting has come a long way in recent years. Creating and using VM’s was once a risky business, used only by the brave on low risk projects.

These days, virtualisation is fast becoming an industry standard, as the technology behind it has matured, offering a totally robust and reliable product. Businesses across the globe are already taking advantage of the overwhelming benefits that virtualisation provides:

Better utilisation of resources
Multiple virtual servers / applications can be consolidated onto fewer sets of physical hardware, making better usage of physical resources. Though the virtual environment is ‘shared’ across physical hardware, each virtual server still has its own dedicated physical resources (RAM, CPU etc.).

Reduced risk
The architecture of Virtual environments allows for more redundancies (such as centralized SAN storage) to be built in, significantly reducing down-time in the event of hardware or software failure. Things can fail independently. For instance, one operating system can fail while others running on the same machine continue to function normally.

Virtual servers consist of a single system file, which means you can easily create a backup copy of your entire VM. If you encounter problems, you can replace your existing VM with your backup copy.

Scalability, Flexibility and Availability
The process of ‘installing’ new servers or allocating additional resources to a particular virtual server is now faster and easier to achieve, it can be done in minutes instead of having to do a physical machine upgrade and buying new hardware. We can just ‘turn it on’ by giving your system more RAM, CPU and storage.

Combined with shared storage device, virtualisation enables you to migrate from one physical machine to another without a single second of downtime allowing easier maintenance of physical hardware. Should a server have a hardware issue, the virtual machines can quickly and easily be restarted on another physical set of hardware, minimising any downtime.

It’s Greener
Better utilisation of resources reduces energy consumption in data centre environments. As much as 70% energy consumption can be achieved in most cases.

RSAWEB has extensive experience with virtualisation technology in various different applications. Many of our Dedicated Server & Managed Hosting Server customers are currently utilising virtual platforms to great effect. Give us a shout to find out how virtualisation can benefit you.

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The benefits of Virtualisation