Rice Blogger

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!

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.

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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.

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