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Hosting: Digital Ocean – $5 / Month VPS – $10 Free Credit!

VPS Hosting $5 per Month @ DigitalOcean – $10 Free Credit!

Get your own private VPS hosting for $5 a month including 2 months free service with our signup code below!

Having been with DigitalOcean since the beginning of 2014, we can safely say that the service is great. Hands down the best we’ve had and very reliable to boot with 100% uptime so far.

It’s also cheap to get started – $5 a month buys you a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 512MB of RAM and a whopping 1TB of transfer. Whilst 512MB RAM may seem skimpy, the 20GB, blisteringly fast SSD drive more than makes up for it – using Apache, 4 medium traffic web sites are running fine.

If you use the following promo code when signing up – 10TOSHIP – you get $10 credit which is enough for 2 months service!

You can of course upgrade to the next level for the price of a beer – from the website:

pricing structure

 

They have a simple, intuitive GUI allowing you to pick what you need in terms of images:

Web UI

Or applications: 

Available Applications

And an easy way to control your VM or “Droplet” as they are referred to:

droplet management

If you sign up with the promo code at the beginning of the post then we get a humble referral fee and you get $10 on top of your $5 deposit which will keep you up and running for a total of 3 months!

Less than the price of a sandwich on the train – go on, you know you want to!

 

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WordPress: Unable To Create Directory Error

This article describes how to securely fix the wordpress “Unable To Create Directory Error”

This is a general permissions error and may be uncovered in a variety of situations; the most common of these is when trying to upload images:

“Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads//. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

There are many various articles about this error and horrifically, a lot of them advise fixes which are glaring security holes and can / will lead to compromise of the web server.

They look something like this: “Change permission of directories to 757 or 777” – doing this allows anyone on the internet to upload write files to your directory!!!

Here is the secure solution:

  1. Check to see which user & group the apache web server runs under. This information is held in the /etc/apache2/envvars file and you can view it as follows:

    Wordpress: Unable To Create Directory Error Fix
    Apache RUN Vars
  2. Create the directory in question if necessary – note: it may already exist:

    Wordpress Unable to Create Directory Error
    Create uploads Directory
  3. Change the group ownership of the directory to the group apache runs under – in this case  you can see that the group is “www-data”:

    Wordpress Unable to Create Directory Error
    Change group permissions
  4. Assign write permission to the group for that directory:

    Wordpress Unable To Create Directory Error
    Change Group Permissions

Job done!

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WordPress: Dashboard Icons Not Displaying Correctly

This article describes how to fix the issue of the admin bar and dashboard icons not displaying correctly.

This can be down to may different things and will affect many sites, not just wordpress.

The first thing to do is to check the afflicted site in all of your browsers.

  1. Are you using Firefox?
  2. Does the site display correctly in Internet Explorer?
  3. Do you use the NoScript plugin?

If the answer to all the above is “yes” then read on – salvation is at hand!

In my attempts to stop Firefox gobbling up 25% and more of my CPU on a regular basis, I looked at blocking some unwanted things like flash etc. and I performed some tweaking of the NoScript Firefox plugin settings, specifically under the “embeddings” tab. In my quest to claw back my CPU cycles I applied the restrictions to whitelisted sites as well as the untrusted sites – in my mind it shouldn’t have been an issue but it certainly was!

 

Noscript Plugin Settings
Noscript Plugin Settings

Make sure that this box is unticked – this solved the problem in my case. Other resources dealing with firefox are listed here and may help you with your issue if the above does not; as with everything IT-related, your mileage may vary – good luck!

Websites look wrong or appear differently – Mozilla

Page displays as gibberish – Mozilla