RSAWEB sponsored Stuart Marais did South Africa proud when he took the gold in his first Ironman 70.3 in Pescara, Italy. Marais finished the Ironman 70.3 in an amazing 3:48:49, with Victor del Corral Morales (Spain) finishing second in 3:49:53, and Albert Moreno Molins (Spain) coming in third in 3:51:26.
Everyone hates being billed by mobile operators for over-usage on their 3G mobile data. It’s impossibly hard to know how much data you have used and when those sneaky higher out of bundle fees apply. You can now forget about “bill shock” with RSAWEB’s new mobile data control panel.
We spend the larger part of our week at the office, so why not make that valuable time spent more enjoyable. Technology enables the amalgamation of lifestyle and career. We’ve searched the internet to find the coolest gadgets that can help you do just that.
The pen is mightier once again.
With almost every task in the office going digital, It would make sense that the pen went digital. The innovators at Livescribe have developed a pen that creates an instant editable digital version of your notes on your iOS device(Android version is due next year); what’s more; you can record audio to your notes as well. The appropriately named SmartPen’s notes can be saved and downloaded later. Watch this video and purchase it at Amazon for $149.99.
The Nomad office worker
As the use of tablets and smartphones increase in the work place, so has the need for a convenient keyboard grown and Cellulon has got it right. The small device displays a virtual keyboard on any flat or opaque surface and connects easily via Bluetooth. No longer will sticky fingers lead to Stickey Keys. Watch how it works here and purchase it at Amazon for $149.99
Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto
Double Robotics’ Telepresence Robot may have just made the act of calling in sick, to go to the beach, a more creative one. Double is an easy-to-use robot that uses an iPad for its controls and videoconferencing. Now you can pop in an out of meetings or visit a colleague for a quick chat, from anywhere in the world. A great solution for widely dispersed companies. Purchase it directly from Double Robotics for $2499
An Audible Shiitake
The Mushroom LED lamp lights up with your touch and can stream music via Bluetooth for your listening pleasure. The shroom lamp is perfect for the desk of a Funghi (or gal). The Mushroom LED lamp can be found here for $42.88
Smarty Ring
Eliminating the need to take your phone out of your pocket, Smarty ring allows you to check all updates by merely glancing at your finger. Not only does this nifty little gadget save your phone’s battery life, it allows you to control your phone without touching it. Very handy in meetings or situations where you cannot access your phone. It might not be made of gold but it is waterproof, has a 24 hour run time and a 3 year battery life. For only $175, you can have full control at the tip of your fingers. Buy it here
RSAWEB loves technology and innovation. So for this festive season, to help you skip those long queues, we put together a list of great gift ideas you can find and purchase online. From simple designs that will add panache, to products that will help you make a more connected home.
We all are looking for ways to make use of that empty space on the walls of our home and a good bet is always to hang up artistic photos of our family. This stylish and minimalist designed floating bookshelf can add that touch of intrigue and flair to your home. It provides easy access to your favourite books and can double up as a shelf for any other object you wish to display.You can purchase this unit on Amazon for only $12.50 or if you prefer making your own, watch this clip.
Are you on the naughty or nice list? Either way cover your bases by lighting up the runway that is your driveway, so Santa can see it from miles away. At the very least you will be rewarded for making his job easy. Leave them out in the day and come night time your garden is transformed into an enchanted landscape. These pebbles can be purchased at Amazon. Price on site varies but can be found at the cost of $6.99 for a set of 100.
The new range of LED light products from Philips are not only energy efficient but allows HUE to set the perfect mood for a romantic night or with strobe light effects, you can party the night away. The light can easily be changed to any colour via Wi-Fi through the HUE app on your smartphone. It comes in four different product ranges: standard bulbs, downlights, bloom and lightstrips. Check it out here. The starter kit can be found on Amazon, retailing at $199.97
A sleek and modern disc finished in brushed metal, with a new-age blue-text LED display. It welcomes users by name and unlocks your front door with your smartphone, but fret not, for those who aren’t prepared to make that bold step to go keyless, you can get programmable e-keys. Get this lock system directly from Goji $245
Imagine music that lights up the room. That’s right, light bulbs that double up as speakers. This super-efficient LED not only saves energy but can end up saving your night as well. Connect up-to 8 speaker bulbs and create a different ambiance for each room or make one big party room. This lighting system can be found on BidorBuy, retailing at R5008.27
Juggling between the correct use of chlorine, pool shock and conditioners can make it a difficult job to keep your pool balanced. This nifty device floats in you pool sucking up the rays from the sun, allowing it to release mineral ions into the water. This ionisation of the water naturally and efficiently controls the micro-organisms growth in your pool, creating mineral water but don’t try and drink it. The Floatron kit can be bought on Amazon for $249.00
Using your fingerprint to do daily tasks seems like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. But the possibility is here and now. This wonderment, known as the Saeco Xelsis, comes with a digital fingerprint scanner that memorises your coffee preferences; such as strength and amount of froth, for up to six people and a nifty display that shows the name of the person whose beverage is being made. Having fingerprints has never made more sense. Check it out at Phillips for $ 4000
Over RSAWEB’s years in web hosting we have helped everyone from small mom an pop shops using our shared web hosting platform to big multinationals with our Enterprise Cloud Servers. We’ve helped many customers grow and scale their infrastructure to meet various challenges. Ecommerce provides an excellent challenge where seasonal fluctuations, advertising campaigns, viral marketing, sometimes bad code, mobile apps, affiliate programs and various sources of traffic put varying amounts of strain on the underlying infrastructure.
The South African Ecommerce market is changing fast with more people getting online and moving past the critical ‘I’ve had 5 years of internet access’ where the internet (in whatever form) becomes part of their daily lives. At this tipping point people are far more likely to purchase online. In South Africa we have 11m+ users online now with 4.5m+ over the 5 years of use mark. The wave is here and more are coming.
The Database Bottleneck
Let’s deal with the database first, it is usually one of the biggest bottlenecks and we see customers ordering more servers instead of upgrading their disk. Most customers hit IOP (input/output operations per second) constraints on the hard disks with read & write intensive applications. This can be solved by adding Database servers or simply by deploying faster disk in the form of SSD’s giving ~40x more disk performance than spinning disk. Clever optimising of DB bottlenecks can speed up you application and save cost.
The Load Balancer
As your Ecommerce site gets busier you reach the limits of a single server and need to load balance between multiple web servers. A load balancer needs to be able to detect when a webserver fails and when a new server is added into the farm, with no manual configuration, in order to direct web users to a functioning server. Setting up your environment from the start with load balancing in mind saves pain later and enables you to add servers and resources on the fly with little downtime.
The Web Server Farm
Cloud Servers are ideal for web content processing and delivery. More can be cloned out or added with a few clicks of a button in our Cloud Control Panel. The configuration of these can be automated with a tool like Chef or Puppet as your site gets busier automating tasks will start to save time and money. An automation tool gives you a consistent mechanism to configure servers each and every time, the benefits of this are enormous. You can stand up a dev environment on our Cloud quickly, test your code changes and then destroy it when it is no longer needed. The key here is that on RSAWEB Cloud Servers you only pay for the hours your server is in use.
Caching, CDN & other performance gains
The importance of caching cannot be understated. Cache at each layer of your service but there is a fine balance between too much and too little. Too much means your customers start seeing out of date data and the wrong information in their shopping carts. Too little and your system will grind to a halt with all the background processing when you hit that seasonal spike or a product of yours gets tweeted by a celeb. We recommend tuning the various layers, tuning the MySQL cache’s, run code specific caching like APC if you run PHP, and split out your stats collection onto separate systems, maybe even running alternative Databases optimised by task like MongoDB or Cassandra rather than defaulting to MySQL or SQL.
Content Delivery Networks can offload a lot of the static content, away from your web servers.
So what next?
It is important to note that this can all be done quite easily but often fails when there is a migration to this way of thinking from a legacy way of building apps to the newer DevOps dynamic environment thinking. ‘Server hugger’ thinking will cause a project to fail if sysadmins don’t embrace DevOps in the Ecommerce space. DevOps solves many of the current management issues, its where automation prevails and nobody SSH’s into production servers anymore but thats for another post.
Ecommerce businesses typically experience rapid growth in South Africa due to the relatively uncontested landscape and the rapidly growing internet user base. We would love to show you how we were able to use our infrastructure building blocks like Cloud Servers, Content Delivery Network and RSAWEB’s CloudConnect to deliver a Hybrid Cloud service that scales and ensures 100% uptime.
Free ADSL Gigs for all SuperDSL clients.
Here is how many free Gigs you will get:
The extra free Gigs go live on the 1st of November and will be added to your account every month. Existing SuperDSL customers will see the extra bandwidth if you log into MyRSAWEB and see your cap size has increased. The pricing has remained unchanged so this one is on us!
You can now enjoy more Internet with less topping up at no additional cost.
If you want to add one of our packages to your account you can do this from the MyRSAWEB control panel or from our website.
Also don’t forget that we offer some of the cheapest ADSL lines around, so move your line to us and save.
We hope you all enjoy the extra free bandwidth.
The RSAWEB team.
We regularly have contact with customers that are moving their servers and hosting from overseas providers back to South Africa. This trend is interesting and there are several reasons for it. You can purchase a hosting service in the US, but usually the latency is between 280ms-400ms and on bad days (eg Seacom outages) it can be higher. Locally hosted content however is on average 10 times faster with latency around 25ms.
What has changed?
How is this relevant in South Africa you may ask? Our internet speeds are increasing as fibre, VDSL and LTE rollout, latency is also decreasing as more content is hosted locally with content caching services like our AfriCDN, Google cache and other providers put more content locally. This means users are getting used to a more stable, lower latency local internet experience.
Its all about happy eyeballs
Google studied the impact that a near undetectable (to a human) additional 300ms (0.3 seconds) had on the users behavior. The result was that users disengaged from the site at a relatively alarming rate of between 5-8%.
Many people are unaware, but recently South Africa had only 1 operational international submarine cable, with 3 others undergoing emergency maintenance. Several large consumer ISP’s had performance problems to US and UK hosted websites however if your app/website/system was locally hosted, you would have experienced no issues and that translates to happy customers.
Serving your content from overseas higher latency servers may unknowingly be costing you customers and losing revenue.
Isn’t it more expensive?
The other misconception is that local hosting is expensive, this was the case until recently but this has fundamentally changed. The local monopoly of Telkom is being challenged, bringing input costs down significantly and thus our price to you.
All in all, if your users are local, it makes sense to host locally.
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