gagah.me

  • The PC Is Coming Back, Thanks to Youtube and PC Gaming.

    This argument is controversial because the sales data of the PC is mixed, to say the least. Worldwide, it’s decreasing. But in the US, it’s slowly coming back[1][2], especially the retail PC market. Apart from the sales figures which I personally think show more about the state of consumer tech hardware industry and the economy, I am slowly seeing more and more about the conventional PC being discussed and talked about.

    Personally, I believe we’re in a period of PC renaissance, especially in the western hemisphere, and amongst the younger demographics. A renaissance that in my personal opinion is fueled by the fire of two things: Youtube, and PC Gaming.

    Thanks to youtube channels like LinusTechTips, JayzTwoCents and the likes, for example, I’ve seen more and more people thinking about going back and buying a PC. Not only that, meme-ish terms like PCMasterRace and its passionate advocates has made the PC sexy again, especially for teenagers.

    Now, this is of course just pure anecdote not backed by any real data, but I can’t remember a time in my young adulthood where the PC is the sexy computing gear to buy, especially among people with actual social skill. But now PC gaming and internet idol subculture complete with the increasingly popular form of entertainment known as Let’s Play has turned the PC into a desirable item again.

    I mean, Markiplier, a popular Let’s Play YouTuber, generates 65 million views for the past 30 days, and has 16 million subscribers. Most of the games he played are on PC. That’s not counting the multitudes of other twitch streamers and youtubers with millions of followers who watch their content daily. This is a free advertising and evangelism platform that the PC never used to have.

    The barrier to entry to building your own PC also can’t get any lower. LinusTechTips channel has been very helpful in packaging hard to understand and usually geeky topics in a playful, fun manner. Just today they made a video about unboxing petabytes of storage and got 400k viewers in 12 hours. Some PC geeks I knew actually hate the channel since it’s not informative to them. But what they’re doing is brilliant.

    The PC is a backdrop to their wild antics and extravagant purchase habits. It’s suggestive marketing. It’s the Top Gear of the PC industry. And as you can see, they are showing a hockey stick kind of growth for their total views per month.

    Now, unfortunately, these contents are very biased to the western hemisphere. For the average people in said hemisphere, they together constitute the new UX to getting a PC. First, from consuming all those contents, you slowly got enticed to buying a PC, or components for a PC.

    Then, you look for complete specifications, and information about things that you want to buy, and whether that’s the best you could buy at a certain budget. Tools like PCpartpicker and Logical Increments has made this so very easy an idiot could do it.

    Then, you need to finally make a purchase. Well, what do you know, with Amazon prime, you can get these things delivered in a day with just a single click.

    Here’s the experience of getting a PC in my country (Indonesia). There is still no popular youtube channels that make it easy for people to understand what is good or bad about the PC, or the components for the PC that they want to buy. So you usually got baited by advertising.

    And then you need to make sure it’s actually good, and the only way to do this if you don’t have any geek friends is you go to online forums, get mixed response, get confused, and then you decide to just get a laptop instead. And then you find out there are Z124s4-t3 and Zq252-t5 types of laptop you can get depending on the regions, and you’re not sure which is which and which one is good.

    I mean, here’s a locally popular site where people get their PC. It’s called Enterkomputer and their site is a total UX nightmare.

    So the ecosystem in other place worldwide is still not very supportive for the average people trying to get a PC. It’s a decision which involves many moving parts, of which I believe has been made very easy in North America thanks to these multitudes of tools and contents. It’s beautiful in its own way, solving fragmentation and marketing issues by making the contents supporting the purchase decisions freely available and interesting to consume. That’s why I’m very optimistic about the future of the PC. Well, in North America, at least.

  • Happy Local Election Day, Indonesian

    Today marks the first time Indonesia held a nation-wide gubernatorial election on the same day. I’m hopeful the best candidate will win and there’ll be no election riots. I’m also hopeful for the future of our state autonomy. It’s the main reason why we now have some of the brightest people acting as governors and mayors.

    And hopefully, Ahok wins the Jakarta election.

  • Setting Up a VPS for WordPress Without an Ounce of Linux Knowledge

    I’ve been seeing this types of questions a lot in WHT. People who outgrew their shared hosting plans but not sure of upgrading to VPS or dedicated server because they’re not technical enough.

    Usually the advice they got is to go for a managed provider, which is of course, a great option, especially if you have more money than time.

    But this guide is for people who wants to squeeze what little money they can save by going with self-managed providers.

    And don’t want to deal with command line. And, don’t want to pay for a cPanel license. Or bother to learn about free, open source panel like webmin.

    Here We Go

    So, you’ve got your VPS. It’s nice. It’s got 2GB RAM, a dedicated CPU core, and a nice flashy SSD. Raw-performance wise, it’s probably four times better than what you’ll get from a shared hosting plan.

    What do you do, then? You’ve never dealt with a command line before. You don’t know the difference between nginx, apache or what version of PHP to use.

    And you don’t need the server for fancy, django powered Node.JS behemoth of an app. You just want to run a wordpress site (or several).

    Well, have you met Server Pilot before?

    Now, Server Pilot advertised themselves as a companion to a Digital Ocean droplets. I’m not sure if that is an attempt to get an acquisition offer but it will 100% work with other VPS providers as well. I’ve tested it.

    In fact, i’ve tested it running a wordpress site on a 256MB RAM KVM from Virmach, and their default setup seems optimized enough to run it fine. You need to run Ubuntu in the VPS to use Server Pilot

    So, here’s their pricing:

    As you can see, even on their free plan, you can use them to run unlimited websites on unlimited amount of servers. That also includes basic firewall configuration so you should be fine running on their default setup without having to worry about basic skiddy attack that can happen when you run a VPS without a properly-configured firewall.

    So. I hope by now you’ve decided to sign up, and once you signed up, you’ll be greeted with this screen:

    Easy enough. Click Connect to Server, and you’ll get this screen:

    Now, when you buy your VPS from any provider, you will get root account details from them, usually in the welcome email. Just take the root password, and paste it there.

    For SFTP password, use a secure one. You’ll need it for when you want to upload files or migrate your site to the server administered by Server Pilot. The username for this SFTP account would be ‘serverpilot’.

    SFTP, short for SSH File Transfer Protocol, is completely different from FTP (File Transfer Protocol). When you’re running SFTP, you’re transferring files across SSH, a much more secure and encrypted data stream. Using SFTP also means that the server doesn’t have to run a separate service for FTP, which might save a bit of resources and less protocols to worry securing about.

    Now, click ‘Connect to ServerPilot’, and ServerPilot will start setting up the server for you.

    Once it’s done, you should see a screen that basically told you to “create an app”. An app can mean anything that requires PHP and MySQL, but in the case of wordpress, they have a special option for it that makes it even easier to set up.

    Tick that ‘wordpress’ option, and the rest is pretty much self-explanatory. After you’re done, remember to create an A record for your domain and point it to the IP Address of the server that’s being managed by Server Pilot. In most cases, you should see your new wordpress site up and available within minutes, but DNS propagation can take up to 24 hours, so be patient.

    And That’s It! Enjoy!

    P.S: If you need a self-managed VPS to run a WordPress on Server Pilot, why not try us at GOODHost? Our plans for 1GB RAM starts only at $6.99/month and it runs wordpress beautifully. This blog, for example, is hosted on our VPS. 🙂

  • On ‘Kodi Fully Loaded’ and Beautiful Interface to Piracy

    That’s some odd title, i know, but i’m talking about the case of some android tv box sellers on Ebay that sells them with HTPC software Kodi, fully loaded with addons that facilitates watching pirated movies and tv series. There’s now a case of them being arrested in the UK.

    From torrentfreak:

    Police have arrested five people on suspicion of selling ‘pirate’ set-top boxes configured to receive pay TV. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit teamed up with FACT, Sky, Virgin, BT, and The Premier League to arrest the sellers, who allegedly supplied Kodi with unlicensed addons.

    To me, Kodi Fully Loaded is just another symptoms of the growingly easy to use and beautiful interface to piracy. My dad, a 60 year old man, for example, seem to watch movie everyday, without realizing that the site where he’s watching them from is actually an illegitimate pirate site. But it’s designed in such a way that barrier to the content is so low that average people who’s not aware of technology will not realized that he or she is doing something illegal.

    In fact, some of those movie streaming sites tend to have names that end in “flix”, or “theater”, that makes people think that this is legit movie streaming site. And if it’s not legit, how wrong could watching a movie by just clicking a single buton really be?

    From my experience with Kodi, the availability of addons for streaming movies, tv series, sports streams and other media content fetch from the internet is pretty impressive. By just buying a $35 box and loading it up with Kodi, it feels like you’re paying $100+ to your cable company. But with kodi, you’ll only need to pay once.

    I can see why the copyright holders are becoming increasingly worried about this issue, but i’m afraid this is just a sign of what piracy will turned into in the coming years. The days of messing with torrent clients, finding legit torrents that are not bundled with virus, getting letters from your ISP, etc. In the future it will be a simple click. The answer is not to arrest everybody, but to lower the barrier to content even more.

    If copyright holders still act greedy and kept trying to get more money from content by means of geoblocking, pulling content from Netflix and putting them in another paid service, etc, this will only get worse.

  • There’s a Demand for a Good Shared Hosting Panel & Billing Software but There’s So Little Choice

    There’s simply too small of choices for web hosting providers on off-the-shelf panel and billing platform to use.

    I really don’t understand why that is. There’s so many choice in the market for open source CMS, or other 3rd party software for sysadmin. But for off-the-shelf hosting panel and billing platform, cPanel seem to have a tight grasp on the market.

    Open source website control panel like Webmin, Vesta or Ajenti V are available, but simply not good enough for commercial adoption or even average people with a VPS to use. They’re just too hard to use. For billing platform, WHMCS, especially after they got acquired by cPanel, now seem destined to be the number one choice for years to come.

    Boxbilling, the one viable open source competitor to WHMCS, seem to be somewhat abandoned. Github issues are not being looked at, and my last experience using them for GOODHost just ends in weird bug that seem to have no resolution. So we decided to migrate back to WHMCS.

    The funny part is they seem to have abandoned support for the pro version as well.

    I wonder if this is because the only ones who use off-the-self software, especially free ones, are kiddie host with a reseller hosting plan. And yet even though that might be true, having only one truly viable product for hosting providers that don’t have the resource to develop their own panel, is not a good look for this industry.

    Competition is always good, and i’m afraid if cPanel and WHMCS became the industry standard, there will be no true innovation in the shared hosting space because we’re inherently tied to cPanel’s development cycles and their closed-source codebase.

    I don’t know, maybe this post is just 10 years too late and there’s simply no need for innovation in the shared hosting space. Unlimited everything is the last innovation this industry will ever made for years to come. Maybe containerized hosting is truly the future.

    Looking at the amount of people that don’t know how to administer a linux server though, i’m not sure if that’s true.

  • 5 Easy Steps to Having The Quickest Loading WordPress Site Ever

    Here it is:
    1. Find a VPS provider. At GOODHost we offer 512mb OpenVZ VPS for $37/year
    2. Open easyengine.io, follow their steps to install a wordpress site
    3. Or use my step. Type this on the command line:

    sudo ee site create yoursite.com --wpredis --   php7


    4. Migrate the contents from the old wordpress site to the new one, or starts anew.
    5. Enjoy

    Proof? Here’s the result of sucuri performance benchmark of this site, hosted on our LA VPS:


    You can test your own wordpress site performance on Sucuri Performance Benchmark

    And here’s a result of pingdom speed test from New York (the server is in LA):


    You can test your own wordpress site performance on Pingdom Speed Test

    Note that i didn’t use a CDN, nor i use any kinds of caching plugins.

    Also, as a bonus: If you need an SSL certificate to give your site an enhanced security & a boost in google rankings, you can use this command with easyengine:

    sudo ee site update yoursite.com --letsencrypt

    This setup is so much faster than the typical wordpress installation on a shared hosting environment, even without static caching.

    The installation steps that i use above basically told easyengine to create a wordpress site using PHP 7 (huge performance boost compared to PHP 5), and use Redis as object memory caching.

    Of course, with a VPS you’d need to know how to properly secure your server. But that’s a guide for another day, and i’m sure your VPS provider would be more than willing to give a hint or two.

  • Why Is There So Many Fake Web Hosting Reviews Online

    At GOODHost, we’ve recently started focusing on marketing ourselves better. To do this, I’ve tried looking into how people purchase their web hosting plans online.

    One of the biggest surprise i found is that there’s so many people who seem to get tricked by a bunch of review sites for hosting that’s neither objective, nor credible.

    Most of these review sites embed an affiliate link on every outgoing link to the web hosting provider they recommend.

    And guess what happens? All of the providers they recommend just incidentally turns out to be providers who pay their affiliates the most.

    As i considered myself quite active and ‘in the know’ about most web hosting companies they mentioned, it almost seem like a joke that they still recommend Blue Host, Hostgator, Site 5 and the likes. These are mostly companies who used to be good but then got acquired by the giant hosting company crusher and ruiner called EIG.

    I thought at first, well, these review sites look quite fake, i mean, just taking a gander at it for five seconds will show you their true motivation, which is for you to signed up and stay for at least 60 days so they can get their payday.

    But it turns out people actually fall for this. It’s pretty often i have people visiting the site, hit up the live chat and said, “Hostgator offers unlimited hosting, why don’t you?

    Then people who came to web hosting forum, mostly trying to get a recommendation on what hosting company is actually good, and then mentioned that they’re considering Hostgator. Or GoDaddy. Or Bluehost.

    It’s not in my nature to take a shit on providers, since i know there’s good people working there, and providing quality support is actually really hard, especially if you have that amount of customers.

    But these companies are just simply not good. At least after their acquisition. And they treat their employees badly. And they don’t care about the customers at all.

    So why do they still get the same amount of attention?

    Maybe the hosting industry, especially the shared hosting part of it, is just too oversaturated and the noise just push customers into picking providers that they heard the most often, but these review sites truly is another beast entirely. They illustrate and contribute to the scummiest part of this industry that i hate the most, which is marketing lies.

    There’s no unlimited hosting. There’s no unlimited bandwidth. There’s resource limits hidden in page 73 of their TOS, and if you go past the limit, your site will either be slowed down to hell, or they’ll tell you to upgrade. They’ll not help you optimize your site, they’ll just kick you to the curb.

    I don’t know the answer to solving this issue, but i know that people need to speak up more often and post reviews on providers they actually liked. I’ve seen some review sites try different methods and not use affiliate link at all, and i hope in the future they got more attention because this is just bad.