TurfSitePH.net Blog

The popularity of WordPress, not just as a blogging platform but more of a Content Management System is steadily increasing among novice and seasoned website developers. WordPress, or simply WP is an open source software / application. One good thing about being an open source product is that once a vulnerability (security hole or issue) is found, a remedy will be ready in a day or two (most of the time, it is less than 24 hours). The challenge now is for the website owners to update their WP installations with the current one.

As of this writing, the official current version of WordPress is 2.7 (downloadable via http://www.wordpress.org). We had already received a couple of emails requesting for technical assistance, as their WordPress-based websites (or blogs) were apparently “hacked”. Investigations revealed that the “hacking” incident is due to the fact the their WordPress site is not yet “patched” or not yet upgraded to the latest version.

A quick upgrade to the latest WP version will prevent “hackers” (though I personally would prefer to call them as “crackers”) from defacing your website, based on a existing security issue found on the older versions of the software or application.

We at TurfSitePH.net is committed to provide the safest yet affordable website hosting service in the Philippines. Thus, you can be assured that our servers are patched as soon as updates are available. However, the updating of our client’s individual websites are not covered by our Service Level Agreements (SLA).

Popularity: 39% [?]

Ever experienced going to a website and your browser will display: Page cannot be displayed?

The computer unit that we share for internet surfing at home uses Smart Broadband. It is not once that I have to call their Customer Service Hotline just to ask them to refresh their DNS Servers, because we are trying to access a website, which we firmly know that is online (because TurfSitePH.net is the host) and does exist, but gets the “Page cannot be displayed” error over and over again. It only means one thing, the DNS Server of my ISP is broken.

Now, if you do not want to spend wasting your time calling your ISP just to request them to refresh their DNS servers (based on my experience, they will act on it after 48 hours), you may want to use OpenDNS instead? OpenDNS will let you use their DNS Servers, instead of the ones provided by your ISP. In this way, we can be assured that we are browsing the latest version of the website, and it also gives you a safeguard against phishers and scammers, as they try to block websites that fall to these categories when you surf to them.

Popularity: 60% [?]