A lifetime supply of ADSL and Web Hosting?

Nope, it’s not a typo. During the month of September, 10 lucky people will win a lifetime supply of ADSL and Web Hosting – plus we’ll throw in a FREE .co.za domain registration to get you started. Sound good?

The prize package includes:

• • A 10GB ADSL Account. (for life)
• • A Home Web Hosting Account with unlimited bandwidth. (for life)
• • 1 x FREE .co.za domain registration.

How to enter

It’s really easy. Simply wish us a happy 10th birthday via Twitter (wish must be sent to @RSAWEB) or Facebook (wish must be posted on our FB wall).

From the list of Twitter wishes, we’ll select 5 winners randomly. From the list of Facebook wishes, we’ll let our community decide on 5 winners – the wishes that get the most ‘likes’ by our fans wins. Simple.
You may enter using both Twitter and Facebook, but only one entry per person is allowed on each platform.

Are you a winner?

Winners will be announced each week (for 4 weeks) via Facebook and Twitter each Tuesday, starting with Tuesday the 6th of September.

Additional mystery spot prizes will also be given to entrants showing extra creativity or love in their birthday wishes.

Be sure to stop by and wish us!

All entrants are subject our competition Ts & Cs.

The majority of South African businesses and many residential customers are currently connected to a 4Mbps ADSL connection. The bandwidth figure is important, but by no means the only factor in determining the performance of your internet connection. Internet browsing, more commonly known as web traffic, is highly sensitive to Round Trip Times (RTT), or commonly known as ping times.

Consider the analogy of plumbing and the internet, with your ADSL connection being the proverbial pipe from the internet to your office or home. A larger pipe does not mean the water will flow faster, it will just allow more water to flow. The speed of the water flow does not increase, as is the case with the internet, which travels at the speed of light.

As with a water pipe, the more you stretch the length of the pipe, the longer it takes for the traffic to travel from the web server to the computer. If the web traffic’s source is the UK, your ping time is about 250-300 milliseconds. The web server to-and-fro communication will slow the website load time down significantly — no matter how big you make your pipe. With a locally-hosted web server, the pipe becomes dramatically shorter, around 20-50 milliseconds, speeding up your web browsing dramatically.

Companies like Google want you to have the best browsing experience possible. This is one of the major factors for Google putting local content caches into South Africa, and even other African countries like Kenya. It’s all about the user experience, and it’s no coincidence that Google’s websites are fast.

To take advantage of the physical ping time limitations, host your website or web application where the majority of your users are. If they are local, host locally, and the same logic holds true for overseas. Hosting locally lends itself to businesses whose main target market resides in SA. Sites hosted locally load considerably faster – leaving the visitor with a much better user experience. An additional bonus, is that most local ISPs provide excellent customer support, with 24/7 access to support staff via live chat, email or telephonically. Bottom line is the users will get the best experience and love you for it.

The ADSL upgrade from 4Mbps to 10Mbps is a good thing though. It will allow you high speed access to local content at the same time as allowing more concurrent data connections for those offices that 4Mb/s doesn’t cut it for. Only expect a faster browsing experience if your 4Mb/s line was previously congested.

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!”

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

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.

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.

The application, Travellogger, was developed by White Wall Web in response to recent stipulation enforced by SARS, which states that effective 1 March 2009, South African tax payers will be required to properly track their travel and related expenses in order to qualify for rebates.

Travellogger enables users to track their mileage online throughout the year and easily export the data to a CSV file for use in Excel, when it becomes time to submit their annual returns. This application is also compatible with most cellphone browsers, making it ideal for “on the road” logging.

All  data is stored on one of our web servers in the Cape Town Data Centre environment, greatly reducing the risk of data-loss normally associated with paper based alternatives. Ruby on Rails is the web language of choice used to build the application and its developers worked in conjunction with RSAWEB engineers to setup and migrate the application onto our web servers.

Visit www.travellogger.co.za to check it out.

1. Do I like this company.
2. Can I see myself buying something from this company.
3. Does this company look trustworthy.

Knowing this I have always seen our home page as our most important company asset, which may be justifieable as we are a internet company. How have you justified your home page? Is it an afterthough because all you really needed was the domain for email? or are you investing in your online reputation and brand?

We have found through clever, relatively inexpensive changes to the structure, colours and layout of our website that users experience has improved which ultimately results in more sales leads.

Think about your home page, and I would reckon a small investment in it will reap far more rewards than through most other marketing efforts.

Thinking of a new dedicated server? Have you thought about virtualisation? Virtualisation is allowing companies to maximise server, storage and power resources. Instead of running each different application on a different set of server hardware, why not run mulitple operating systems on one machine.

RSAWeb is helping customers to maximise dedicated servers. Instead of purchasing 2-3 servers for a production / development setup, why not virtualise and use one server to do the job of many. The latest Dell XHD server from RSAWeb is extremely powerful, with 8 CPU cores and up to 32GB RAM. This can support multiple virtual machines. For example, a server with 8GB RAM allows you to run a production frontend server on 2 cores and 2GB RAM, another database server with 4GB RAM and the balance can be split amongst smaller development servers. All on 1 set of hardware!

At the same time, you will need to make sure you arent overutilising your resources, however Virtualisation has a great benefit that should you need to scale this out at a future date as your requirements grow, you can easily migrate one of the virtual servers to another physical server also running Citrix Xen (RSAWeb’s virutalisation standard) – this allows for easy flexibily, all without any reinstalling or changing of settings on the server, amazing!

Use your server in a flexible manner and cut your costs whilst also going GREEN! Using the latest AMD and Intel processors and DDR2 RAM you use less power, less cooling and benefit the environment at the same time.