My first deep dive into Bitcoin was back in 2013. The price had been climbing steeply since 2012, and I started to realise this was more than just a weird experiment by computer geeks. Back then, it was a real wild west, and the media was filled with stories of fortunes made and lost. The …
Gold and Silver have been recognised as money and a store of value for centuries. It was only 52 years ago, when President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, that we started living in a world of FIAT currency, which has nothing tangible backing it. Before that, the US dollar was “honest money”, directly …
I’ve been a fan boy of Paddle as a payment system for aMember since 2021. So much so, I wrote and contributed the original Paddle (Classic) plugin to the aMember core. Why do I love Paddle so much? Quite simply because it’s a Merchant of Record (MoR) payment provider. This means they go beyond just …
aMember makes it simple to sell digital products and subscriptions worldwide, and has a variety of tax modules to suit your home tax jurisdiction and intended audience. With many aMember sites selling internationally, it’s pretty common to see pricing in US Dollars (USD), even if the business is located outside the USA. For example, my …
aMember makes it simple to sell digital products and subscriptions worldwide, but selling to European Union countries is a major tax accounting nightmare. In fact, according to official EU Parliament data, the cost of VAT compliance for small businesses (SMEs) is about US $16,000 (EUR15,000) PER YEAR! In this blog, I’m going to highlight the rules …
Every year, the war on spam escalates, making it harder for legitimate businesses to get email through to their customers too. Gone are the days where you could simply send email from your web server and expect it to land in the inbox. Now, you have to be an expert in email hosting, deliverability and security, as …
I moved my Trust Vega SaaS to a new web host recently, which meant the dedicated server IP address I’d spent the last 6 years nurturing to ensure our excellent email delivery had to change. Until that point, I had never really had to think much about the wisdom of keeping web and email services …
A couple of years ago, I switched our cPanel servers to use the more modern FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM). Although requiring slightly more memory than other PHP FastCGI implementations, the appeal is superior performance, scalability, and security. All was great, apart from one teeny, tiny issue… PHP-FPM would periodically and randomly go 100% CPU and …
As we’ve grown, I’ve started seeing some occasional strange errors when trying to SSH or push to GIT repositories on certain user accounts on our cPanel server. Then today, when switching an account to PHP8, the error locked up SSH entirely, and would only go away when I rolled back to PHP7.4 Turns out, the …
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post showing how to track aMember sales in Google Universal Analytics “Enhanced Ecommerce” using Google Tag Manager. Well, Google Analytics Version 4 (known as GA4) is now out of beta, and I’ve started migrating my aMember sites tracking to use GA4. This article shows a clean install …