Hosting in South Africa
Posted on August 23, 2010
Filed Under Content, Getting started, Your own boss | Leave a Comment
I never thought I would see the day South Africans could forget about caps-for hosting!
Well this is the bold claim from South African based TsunamiNet.co.za. I am going to give them a try and see what gives. I will not be moving blog4cash.co.za just yet – so you will not see any changes or downtime, but I will move some of my other sites over so I can check their speed, availability, and so on.
An example of why a dedicated server is better than shared hosting:
A friend of mine had a very nasty experience with shared hosting (which has made me look into dedicated hosting). Now don’t get me wrong, the same can happen both ways – it depends HOW you maintain your dedicated server.
Paypal, probably the widest spread online payment gateway, was being used on one of her sites. The hosting company simply upgraded the version of PHP on the server – without letting her know!. A safety feature built into the new version was not allowing “paypal” in the URLs used. This meant you could not have a return page (success or failure) of paypalApproved.php or anything like that. She had and it broke. The only way she found out was when the customer complaints started rolling in and then she had to look for the problem and code around it.
As I said, if your dedicated server is also maintained by the hosting company the same could happen – but you CAN change that. You can either maintain the server yourself (not recommended unless you really know what you are doing with security patches and so on) or simply get them to let you know – so you can schedule a better time or do some research about it first.
Ok, so what I am doing with TsunamiNet.co.za is putting some sites up there and monitor the performance. If they pass I’ll let you know, if they don’t well I will let you know anyway 
Technorati Tags: TsunamiNet, South Africa, Dedicated Server, Blog4Cash, PayPal
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Just a thought…
Posted on July 27, 2010
Filed Under Your own boss | Leave a Comment
I often wonder why some people make it so big and others don’t. Ok, lets get one thing clear – I understand that not everyone relates to the same set of goals. As a personal example, I prize time with my family over maximizing the amount of money I can make in my business. Naturally there is a need to provide the fundamentals, but hey my kids don’t wear branded clothing!
What I am saying is that if you look at things in the business world, a vast number of those that “make it big“, technically, don’t belong there. Jees – did I say that out loud? What I mean is that we “expect” someone with a good education to go far and someone without a good education to remain relatively “low” on the corporate ladder.
What makes the people like Bill Gates – a university drop out – become so successful? Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout estimated as being worth billions.
Well perhaps qualifications do not reflect on intelligence or aptitude. How about that!
Matt Mullenweg – another of the internet’s young success stories, has this thought posted on blog:
1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
I find I have to stop chasing the next shiny object. Staying with something beyond the intellectual challenge – and actually bringing something to market is more about motivation and stubbornness than anything else. So it makes sense to me.
Braam Malherbe, a fellow South African, and one of the men who walked the great wall of china, puts it a different way: Don’t get a job, get a passion. Pursue your passion and the money will follow. You can get Braam’s book “The Great Run” on Kalahari.net.
Do you manage to keep motivated for a particular project? How important do you rate talent? What do you do to help keep focused on a project/goal all the way?
As always, Thanks for reading.
Dave
Technorati Tags: Braam Malherbe, Great wall of China, Mark Zuckerberg, South Africa, Success, Matt Mullenweg
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Posted on July 25, 2010
Filed Under Content, Your own boss | Leave a Comment
I came across this really great site called Change Your Thoughts. It has loads of motivational goodies including meditations!
One of the posts I enjoyed was about manifesting your intentions – a big one for me 
(Secret fan)
I downloaded the free ebook How to Reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers and will read it as soon as I get a chance.
I also bookmarked this post listing 50 free business ebooks.
I also enjoyed these 100 ways to develop your mind. The programmer in me had to read 9 ways to debug your mind.
Read, listen, enjoy.
Technorati Tags: ebooks, blog, blog4cash, blogging, monetizing your blog, south africa
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Posted on July 23, 2010
Filed Under Content | 1 Comment
Now you can’t deny that 500 million users is a good target market for your blog promotion! Here is an overview post on social media in general: How to promote a blog with social media” and here is a post I made about using social media to drive traffic to your site.
I have written about facebook and other social media as traffic sources, so I will leave that for now.
Some interesting facts about facebook at this stage.
1. A year ago they had 150 million users – over 300% annual growth!
2. Their revenue is approaching $1b.
3. They are planning to release a story feature.
4. They are making a movie about facebook.
5. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed about the IPO, the lawsuit and more.
6. Mark Zuckerberg is going to star in the Simpsons
7. Here is a list of fun facebook facts including easter eggs!
8. You can schedule your status updates! Why?
9. There is a lot you can do with your status updates – even make them upside-down!
10. And finally the strangest facebook profile ever!
I hope you enjoyed that! Any others you care to add?
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Is your Router safe?
Posted on July 22, 2010
Filed Under Content | Leave a Comment
It seems to be my day for security I have just spent most of the day fighting with AJAX and something called “same origin policy”. The nuts and bolts here is that if you want to run AJAX (and this includes Javascript) across domains (or subdomains) you can’t. Well not without going through hoops anyway!
A vulnerability we home ADSL users are faced with is a router attack exploiting the very thing I was fighting with today! The attack is called DNS rebinding. Not wanting to get too technical, I’ll leave it up to Peter Bright in his post. Peter provides a useful list of vulnerable routers – so have a check to make sure yours is not listed as a “yes”.
Peter’s advice
In the meantime, the best defense is probably to ensure that your router does not use the default password. Though this can’t guard against exploitation of actual flaws in the router’s software, it will at least prevent trivial attacks from being made. Changing the router’s IP address away from its typical default might also serve as some protection; though the attack could be used to target any IP address on a local network, a little obscurity tends to work well against widely targeted attacks.
Blog4cash feedback
Your homework today is to make sure that you have a safe router and that you have turned off auto-complete in your browser – or at least read about the browser vulnerabilites.
Technorati Tags: Blackhat security conference, Router, vulnerability, DNS rebinding, blog4cash, South Africa
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About
Blogging for cash is a dream many of us share. Getting out there and doing it is something very few achieve.
I hope this blog will inspire, motivate, and inform you enough to make it across the line to those who have done it!.