Late yesterday evening our website was ‘hacked’ by a bunch of you-know-whats. With no response from our web hosting company – and still none at this stage, some 3 hours after their technical support is supposedly open – ours hands were tied. Put us behind a steering wheel and we know what to do, give us FTPs, CPanels, PHPs, etc and we’ve got just about as much chance as getting the space shuttle Discovery out of its hangar. However, we didn’t give-up and managed to find that just our homepage was affected, which means that many of you may not even know what all the fuss is about.
Why are we telling you all this? Quite simply, you deserve to know what happened and to know that we take our commitment to you, our readers, very seriously. That is why we will be leaving our current web hosting company in the dust and moving SACarFan to a far more substantial and professional service provider (with 24-hr support for us non-propellor heads).
They say there are no guarantees in life, but there is one exception to that rule…computers. We full expect the move to be fraught with dangers that could strike at any moment and prevent you from viewing the latest car news, images and videos. All we can ask is for your patience in this regard and believe it when we say, no one will be jumping up & down more than us in the coming days to ensure this move happens quickly and smoothly.
There is some good news though. We have a new contributor to SACarFan, Richard Webb. Richard has been a professional publisher since 1981 and has lived between South Africa and the UK throughout his life. A member of the South African Guild of Motoring Journalists, he is working on a series of automotive books for publication in SA and international markets. Richard has recently driven the Nissan X-Trail so we look forward to bringing you his thoughts later in the week.
You can also now follow our editor, Scott Hayes, on twitter. He’s never without his iPhone from which he sends his comments on motoring news, what he’s driving, photos from launches he’s attending and more. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter too for the latest updates.
You would have noticed that Ford South Africa have had a couple of ads running over the past month. We’re pleased to say this is the first ad campaign of its type on SACarFan and we fully intend to bring you more relevants ads like this one in the future. Advertising is the life-blood of any publication and after two years, SACarFan is in a position to offer advertisers a platform through which to showcase their products that are relevant to car fanatics like yourselves, as well as providing vital revenue that we can reinvest to make SACarFan bigger an better. The wheels are already turning in this regard, which means we can all look forward to a refreshed SACarFan a little later in the year. If you have any comments or suggestions on how we can improve the site, then now is a great time to send us an email for inclusion in our brainstorming sessions.
In short, we hope to have our systems running a little smoother by the end of the week with the intention of continuing to keep you up-to-date with the lastest motoring news – just like we have been since our launch back in February 2009.
