When it comes to hosting your site everybody always say host it locally, but despite Internet becoming more and more affordable in South Africa hosting your site locally still cost you an arm and a leg.

But why host it local? Hosting locally has some advantages like faster loading time and better reliability for local visitors. Now there are numerous types of local hosting packages available but for now I will focus on dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting is when you are in complete control of the server, you decide what operating system to run, what software etc. Dedicated hosting is ideal if you are serving large amounts of data a month and require lots of processing power.

Here is a list of the leading hosting companies in South Africa offering dedicated hosting and how much you can expect to pay.

Once again MWEB is leading the race for affordable hosting like they did with affordable ADSL in South Africa. However it is still shocking to see just how expensive hosting in South Africa are, specially if you are looking at dedicated servers.

What hosting package are you using? Tell me in the comments, would love to hear.

With WordPress 3.0 that got released only a few months back, the open source CMS platform is winning large amounts of developers over when it comes to choosing a CMS platform for their projects.

What makes WordPress so spectacular is the way the core functionality is coded, allowing for developer to create plugins and themes that can do just about anything without modifying any of the WordPress core functionality.

WordPress is steadily on the increase in South Africa, with a few local companies already primarily developing on the CMS

Here is a list of 10 WordPress plugins developed by South Africans:

AnyFont
AnyFont is a WordPress plugin by Ryan Peel that enables you to use any custom TrueType or OpenType font to replace standard fonts anywhere on your site.

Admin Custom Styles
Admin Custom Styles is a WordPress plugin by Nick Soper that allows you to customize the WordPress admin login screen to suite your own personal brand.

International SMS Subscription Manager
International SMS Subscription Manager is a plugin by myself that allows you to add SMS subscription and notifications to your WordPress blog through a sidebar widget.

Remind Me
Remind Me is a WordPress plugin by Christopher Mills that makes the task of deeplinking to other posts on your blog breeze by automatically finding posts related to your content and allowing you to deeplink on keyword with a simple click.

Mobile Press
Mobile Press is a WordPress plugin by Tyler Reed that turns your WordPress powered website into a full blown mobile friendly site with ad support when viewed from a mobile phone.

WP Section Index
WP Section Index is a WordPress plugin by Matty Cohen that enables you to create a widgetised table of contents for the current page or blog post, based on headings within the content.

Copy Compass
Copy Compass is a WordPress plugin by Nicholas Duncan that automatically analyses your posts or pages to SEO best practices and then giving you a score and recommendation on where you can improve the SEO.

Community Cloud
Comminity Cloud by Miguel dos Santos is a WordPress plugin that displays a “tag cloud” of all the people in your community who have contributed to your WordPress powered site by commenting. The more someone has commented, the bigger and bolder their link.

Please Link 2 Me
Please Link 2 Me is a WordPress plugin by James that adds a text box containing all the code necessary for visitors to easily create links back to your article from their website.

AStickyPostOrderER
AStickyPostOrderER by Andre S Clements is a WordPress plugin that lets you manipulate the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all on your WordPress powered site.

Maybe you have been using one of these plugins and didn’t even notice they were developed by local developers, well now you know. If you are a South African and have developed a plugin feel free to post it in the comments.

When two people fall in love and get married it is a joyous occasion, right? Wrong!

When Simon Dawson (Tyrel Meyer) and his black girlfriend, Jackie Msolisi (Astara Mwakalumbwa) announce their engagement, Simon’s racist, white parents are furious.

Felix Dawson (Ian Roberts), a staunch Afrikaner, and his pretentious, Jewish wife Sheila (Bo Petersen), are determined not to let their son “marry the help”. Jackie’s parents, Pauline and Clarence Msolisi (Sylvia Mdunyelwa & Kwezi Kobus) are equally appalled by their daughter’s decision to marry “a Whitey”. Pauline vows to stop the wedding at any cost.

I Now Pronounce You Black and White is a hilariously fun film, full of outrageous characters that will make your family look like the Brady Bunch, as true love tries to conquer all, against all odds.

I Now Pronounce You Black and White is South Africa’s “first” romantic comedy directed by Oliver Rodger that is set to launch in the middle of this month at the Cape Winelands Film Festival (CWFF).

Viewers can expect to see the first screening of I Now Pronounce You Black and White at their local Nu Metro cinema from 14th of May 2010.

To stay updated with happenings join I Now Pronounce You Black and White’s Facebook Fanpage or follow their Twitter stream.

When twitter introduced its geolocation functionality to the world everybody was wondering what it would be useful for, now the answer is here.

Twitter recently started to roll out its new local trends functionality to new users day by day and today I just got my local trends activated. What local trends does is make use of twitter’s geolocation functionality to see what twitter users are tweeting about in specific areas. This will enable you to see whats trending in your area and not just the whole world.

Unfortunately the local trends currently does not have any South Africa cities to choose from, but twitter clearly states the following: “Don’t see your location? We’re working on it.”

Follow me on twitter here or check out TweSMS my new twitter to SMS notification system if you are on twitter.

ZATorrents opened it doors today to the public. ZATorrents is a new initiative by owner of ZA-Portal, the free local proxy service that allows you to browse and download content with local only cap.

ZATorrents is having a new signup competition, and I decided to help out a bit. The ZATorrent competition is a refer contest , the top 3 members to refer the most users get a prize as listed below.  To refer someone is quite easy , during signup you just put your name into the refer box and that is it.

Prizes:
1st Place: 5GB International – Unshaped
2nd Place: 5GB International – Shaped
3rd Place: 3GB International – Shaped

All account SAIX Based.

The contest will end on 28th August 2009! and the winners will get their prize exactly at 7:00PM.

So this is what I propose, go sign up to ZATorrent and use referer name igeek. Then if igeek gets one of the prizes, I’ll have a small competition for you guys to win the prize.

UPDATE

If there is no referer box simply pm the user ZAPortal with the words Referer: igeek

Yesterday afternoon I decided to install a nifty plugin called Flagfox, this plugin displays a flag next to the url corresponding to the country the site is hosted in. So this morning while having my first cup of coffee and browsing my normal blogs like iMod and 2Oceansvibe I noticed that non of these site are actualy hosted in South Africa.

This made me think, what classifies a site as a local site? Is it simply the co.za domain? Or perhaps the fact that the author lives in South Africa? Maybe its because the content is only geared towards local people.

For me what makes a site local is a combination of almost all of the factors above. Personaly the 1st thing I look at when classifying a website as local is checking where it is hosted, and then obviously the content.

This brings me to the local blog aggregators Afrigator and Amatomu, how do they specify if a blog is South African? Do they actualy check if site is relevant to South Africa or is it up to the author of the blog to decide whetere his site is local? As previously stated for me for a site to be a local site it needs to be hosted localaly and content must be relevant to South Africa, the first can be debatable on if the content is realy relevant to South Africa. Now take Carblog as an example, I could be wrong but just a quick visit to the blog released nothing realy local to me, just posts about cars being released with price tags in pounds. Now is this a local site cause it has a co.za domain or because the author resides localy as the content is not realy relevent to South Africa and the site is hosted in USA.

Sure everybody has their own views of what makes a site local and I would like to have your views on this, as 8 out of the top ten 10 South Africa blogs on Amatomu (Afrigator was down at the time I wrote this) are not hosted localy and some of them has content not relevant to South Africa.

Please give me your views on what you think makes a site local.