NeoHide Technologies

Yesterday, on Wednesday August 13, 2008, the NeoHide.com domain was renewed with the GoDaddy domain registrar. Since I was doing renewal for this domain name, I had some other domain names renewed as well. The total cost amount up to over US$100 dollars. As you know there is such a thing called GoDaddy Discount Voucher (or coupon), I made use of the 25% discount, which reduced the cost to about US$90. The discount code that I used was

gds0124a

There were also some other discount vouchers, but so far this seems to be the best offer, taking away 25% of the total cost, which includes Whois Privacy Protection, against prying eyes. In addition to domain renewal, I have also transferred another domain name NeoHide.org from NameCheap to GoDaddy.

Initially, there seems to be benefits for account holders renewing 5 or more domain names at the same time, so that Whois Privacy Protection is free, however it does not seem to be the case. Anyway, my domain names are more or less managed by GoDaddy, fingers crossed that GoDaddy offer a better service, or otherwise I might consider moving away from them.

After several months of hesitation, I guess it was about time to perform a major upgrade on the PHP engine for the NeoHide site. As my hosting server, BlueHost, purely supports both PHP 4 and PHP 5, and it was highly recommended that the latter is relatively more advanced and provides a better performance, it was undoubtedly a very much sooner or later approach to be taken.

From the control panel of my hosting server, it was a straight-forward procedure to perform the upgrade, just within a click of a button. A screen-shot was taken and shown on the left.

However, before I actually perform the upgrade, a backup is nevertheless required just in case things do go wrong. It was easy to perform the backup, directly from the BlueHost cPanel (see screenshot below).

Once again, it was quite a straight-forward procedure to perform the backup using the cPanel. The PHP 5 option was activated after the backup of the hosting server is completed. Everything went pretty smooth and fine. I was definitely glad.

BlueHost also provides two additional options, or rather features, for its members; that is, the IonCube and SourceGuardian. The descriptions of both functions are given below:

The ionCube PHP Accelerator is an easily installed PHP Zend engine extension that provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or other application compromises.

SourceGuardian is the only serious choice for protecting and encrypting your PHP source code assets. With flexibility that other products only dream of – Professional developers everywhere are using SourceGuardian products to distribute their scripts safely.

It was relatively easy to install the scripts. I could use the pre-installed command to install the script automatically into the php.ini file, or alternatively, do it manually. The latter was chosen, so that I have clear control of what is going to be modified in the file. Voila! All went fine and well, so we now do have a site that is clearly optimised for PHP 5. You would probably see the performance improvement as well as a much secured environment.

Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO

Call it a statement, a speech or even an announcement, as a webmaster for NeoHide.com, I am happy to say that the year 2007 has been relatively good overall. Based on the statistics provided by Google Analytics, this year has shown remarkable gush of traffic (special thanks to Google’s organic traffic) during the months of May, June and December (click to see screen-shot below)

For webmasters, traffic simply means revenue and content generates traffic; though the incoming traffic is not always constant (as Google often updates its algorithm dynamically), I am rather pleased with the outcome so far. In order not to violate Google’s policy, I will not illustrate the revenue earned from this site.

From my experience, it seems that the blog site has quite a potential to make it bigger, the only downside is that I did not have sufficient time to fully exploit the potential of the website. Hopefully, more time can be devoted to further improve the site; particularly on the content.

In addition, other areas of improvement have been highlighted, such as new theme, engine upgrades and readers’ participation. Overall, it has been a good year in 2007; and we promise to improve further in 2008. Last, but not least,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Cheers,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO

The NeoHide Linking Point Site has just celebrated its first birthday. Over the past year, our readership has grown slowly, albeit steadily. The growth of the main site has unpredictably shown its capacity and potential to expand further. Nonetheless, most of the development is normally restricted by the lack of time available for the site.

With the innovation and idea to expand further, NeoHide will be expecting further growths for the second year, and to celebrate the quick development of the first year, we have purchased another domain for NeoHide – that is NeoHide.org – this very official blog.

We will be looking foward to improve our site and to enhance the capacity to reach out to more readers. We appreciate all faithful members who have been loyal readers to our site. A very special thanks to you.

Many Thanks,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO