Recently found a great deal on a really tiny VPS hosting. It is only a 128mb OpenVZ VPS with 500GB of bandwidth, but sufficient for me to have it setup with PPTP VPN and then use it to browse around. This is a VPS hosting in the United States, but I am also in the US and manage to get some friends to test out the connectivity. Streaming video on Hulu is actually decent from Malaysia and also Singapore. I am assuming my friends are using UniFi in Malaysia.

For me, there is still good use of this VPN as I can secure my connection when I am using a public WiFi. Next plan is to install OpenVPN to see if that works well on this little VPN as well. I follow an online guide for the steps to setup PPTP VPN on OpenVZ VPS hosting. It is quite straight forward and done in like 2 hours because the enabling of PPP via SolusVM actually needs to be done slowly. I disable it and waited it to reboot completely then enable it again, also wait for it to reboot. Then the PPP Works fine!

I must say that I had not blog much or concentrate much on what I always liked to do online, which is to do Search Engine Optimization. But due to another newborn, migrating and new job role, I am struggling to keep this interest. Also at the same time, it is no longer profiting for me to do this.

Previously I own tones of website and all frequently update. But now I only own a hand full of core website that I focus. At the same time, I felt sad that there is so many effort going onto these website and it seems to be going down. So I am trying to work on a few of my website mainly my Malaysia Classifieds which is the first website I have done, and then focus a Business Card Printing website that is more of little online business I had pass to my family to manage since I am no longer in Malaysia. Also trying to start some project that is more related to my career in telecommunication industry just to keep my interest.

So any tips, with all the Panda and Penguin, wonder if there any new way (white hat) to optimize my website? Any tips?

I must say that in all my tries in affiliate marketing, it fail most of the time or at some time. Other times, I don’t earn enough to meet the cash out amount, which translate to nothing. Therefore my interest is never in affiliate marketing, but I still like to explore around search engine optimization, and do spend time to explore certain keyword. I must say that predicting the next trend is much easier than to compete in the current keyword for search engine optimization.

From my curiosity and experiment, I somehow got a niche last Christmas whereby I got a small amount of payout from Amazon affiliate alone. It was a simply website created with blogspot and with only 18 blog posts targeting Air Swimmers Remote Control Nemo and Shark.  Pretty happy with the result as it is mainly search engine optimization that result in the payout.

If you host your domain on WordPress.com, this is your chance to monetize your blog. Not sure if they will release WordAds for everyone as currently they are picking those blogs that is eligible for this program base on traffic, engangement, content and language used. The biggest barrier I am seeing is that an individual will need to use custom domains, which means purchasing their own domain name and mapping it there. WordPress.com does it for USD17/year.

A big step for WordPress to earn some money and attract more bloggers.

Kids, don’t do this at home!

Actually it was not quite a simple task for me to move one of my semi-dedicated hosting to a VPS hosting in two weeks. But to reduce my web hosting cost, I had to go VPS and it also allow me to learn more. Plus I am working as a application system administrator, how can I fail in setting up my own server right?

The main hurdle was that my server keeps going down initially and that was very painful as I am restarting my server from my Nokia E72 or my iPad 2 or via my Laptop at different times. Everytime it goes down I had problem connecting to my server or it is way too slow. Lucky I manage to get some sypmtoms and the default Apache and MySQL setting is actually not suitable at all for server of this size.

Fine tuning the httpd.conf and my.cnf for more than twenty times and finally it has been stable. Although there are times it is using swap memory but I am reluctant to go any more lower. The normal memory usage is only around 225 MB which I think is great.

Next step is to do backup. I have done mysql backup daily to be transfered to another server but filesystem I am still doing it manually from time to time.

Visit my Malaysia Classifieds and let me know what you think of the speed. It is pretty good compare to previous hosting in US, currently it resides in a VPS at AIMS datacenter.

For three years I have been working with the unix environment at my 9 to 5 job, it has help me in many ways as a webmaster as well. I would very much recommend any webmaster to have some basic knowledge in unix/linux command line. I have just bought myself some low end VPS to learn all about unmanage webhosting server.

Holding the root is not something new, also I have successfully setup a Ubuntu LAMP previously, so it should be a piece of cake. Not knowing that currently I am working with a low end VPS, therefore I decided not to install any control panel and phpmyadmin. I have moved my personal dormant domain, adiwong.com to the webhosting. It comes with one IPv4, so typing 46.23.67.254 will bring you directly to my server, woohoo!

It is up with Apache (comes default), MySQL (needed some upgrade) and PHP (installed). So my website is up, will restore the original website in days to come. Next plan is to try doing multi-domain with one IP that is given to me. Some OS hardening as this unmanaged service is quite scary as there is no backup and they will do no security. Will come out with a plan whereby I will schedule some backup so that I could restore them when needed.

I know that I may have not blog on Riceblogger for quite some time now as time as change and do little blogging but focuses more on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for some of my website. Blogging has never quite been a successful journey for me especially for this blog as I am still few hundreds visitor daily due to some great content written in the past.

Anyhow I still do maintain a few blog especially a car blog that a friend of mine and me have been writing it for more than 2 and 8 months. Some of the Malaysian bloggers that I have seen quitting but their blog are still online as they have other aims to maintain the hosting including Sabahan, Adesblog (from daily to monthly) and 5xMom (although I know she still maintains her personal blog). <— I did a trackbacks hopefully they will see this and not be covered by all the comments yet to be approved.

I am at the same boat as those above as I believe there are so many more better information website or question & answer website that could provide solution to the public. But this blog has helped me a little in my career as I have noted down some tips for mysql and I tend to come back to refer as a notes, so I think I will try to maintain it as long as possible.

Have been so busy lately mostly with my new job as there is still lots of thing I need to do some catching up and needed to focus more time on my career. Also, I have invested myself a brand new Macbook Pro, it has brought quite a lot of ups and down in this recent months. I bought the old model, and only notice a month later, it is now pretty worthless as the 15″ is now the new model is packed with a quadcore i7. So knowing that my laptop is most probably on a 2 year shelf life, I needed to work harder to get the ROI from this new Macbook Pro.

Apple is quite a unique thing but it is not as good as I thought it would be. Firstly, the unibody which I had high expectation as it is a aluminum body which helps to lose heat easily. But it is not that cool that I can work on my lap. Previously, I had a HP Elite Pro from my work, which is an aluminum body laptop, but the bottom is still plastic, I could work pretty well on it even to work an hour or two on my lap.

Moreover I had to learn so many more shortkeys, but it is just too much, I miss the delete, home and end button from the Windows keyboard. Luckily, I still have my desktop but I can’t afford to throw this investment so I will need to bear with it for 2 years until I make my decision for another laptop/desktop.

Plus side is that there is quite some nice program that comes with the Apple OS and the swiping is quite neat that I am less dependent on a mouse.

As for the new website, I am still doing the data entry and trying it out, hopefully it will get better results compare to all my previous websites.

It is quite addictive in the United States, and there are a lot of clone spawning in each countries. But the main topic today was to introduce this Mighty Deals website which is mainly for Webmaster, I found it few days back and been looking for some new deals.

I have bought and installed this Templatic Real Estate WordPress Theme quite long ago but did not find time to promote it as I am quite busy with my new daily job and there is too much to catch up. Templatic Real Estate Theme is specifically meant for one purpose, which is a property classifieds. So I decided to give it a try. I did a Malaysia Property Classifieds. It is quite painless with the install as mentioned on their website, single click auto install. I like that they have included dummy data whereby you could get it started with nice pictures and property ads already posted just for the sick of trial.

The search feature is what make me buy them as I browse through so many wordpress classifieds scripts, very little could do specific advance search feature on a wordpress theme.

Other nice features include the loan calculator, multiple color theme, agent profile site and some small little widget that makes this website great. Despite that, it took me quite some time to add the type feature so that people could search by apartment, link-house, office, shop lots and much more.

Visit my site at http://PropertyTrade.my

Templatic Real Estate Demo

It seems that our Malaysia first blog aggregator is no longer working all the way back to 23 September. As a person that likes blogging, likes the SEO and the community that I could belong, PetalingStreet.org seems to land on the wrong person hand.

I liked the new face lift that is done on the new PPS, but hated that the owner is selling its soul in order to gain his ROI for the amount he paid for that site, I am sure he is doing great as he is selling text link to 5 websites and still able to maintain a pagerank of 2 and not get strip of everything at the early months.

Sadly enough the last tweet by the owner that pingger is down is now 15 days old.

Is PetalingStreet.org still fixable? Will it catch up with the latest web technology? Will there be loyalty at PPS?

I have registered my site with Innity for a long time now. The very first post about Innity was in April 2009. Previous requirements are 2,000 pageviews a day but the new requirements are 100,000 pageviews per month and 20,000 unique visitors a month. I find that in the long term we could earn a steady income. Innity is quite fair allow website publisher to display alternative ads in the event that there is no ads from them, this is what I liked about them.

There is big sites using Innity, therefore allowing Innity to land on great advertisers from Malaysia. If you have visitors from Malaysia, Innity is definitely some way you can make some extra money online.

Their support has been quick as the recent malware issue, they kept the communication with us to solve the issues, and I have inserted their code back to my website. Although it hurts a little, but I think all my rankings regain its position.

Nuffnang has been great at the start but unfortunately I see the income not being stable this few months and also it is not suitable for website as it is mainly targeted for blogs.

So give Innity a try if you meet their requirements.