The Technology Prophecy.co.za uses

We’re a small company, but we have nice technology working hard to give you, our customers and forum users, an excellent experience when using our services, or purchasing from our store.

Firstly, as already mentioned in a previous blog, Prophecy.co.za mainly uses Apple products in the office. We’ve got 2 iPhones, an iPod touch, a couple of iPod nanos, 4 Macbook Pros and 1 Mac Mini. Other than our dot matrix printer machine, which runs windows XP, and our test bench machines, all our work machines are Apple products. Our accountant also uses a windows laptop, as our accounting software doesn’t run on Macs.

A second thing that we find we cannot live without, is notebook computers. Barring the Mac Mini and our printer machine, all the rest of our machines are notebooks. We find the portability is something we can no longer work without. Mugg & Bean Wednesdays (which came on a Thursday this week) couldn’t exist without notebooks, and working remotely while on holiday is also something that simply cannot happen without the potability of a notebook computer.

We also make use of various software products, which helps us perform our tasks. Rescuetime to monitor our productivity, Mailplane for multiple gmail accounts, Waveboard for collaboration, IM clients (Adium, Skype and iChat) for communication with each other, leaving messages to phone customers and placing quick orders with our suppliers, as well as checking ETA’s on out of stock products, 1 Password to keep track of our passwords and not waste time trying to remember passwords all the time, to name but a few. These things make us a lot more efficient, and while building a small company, it’s all about efficiency. You don’t have an entire marketing department, or a tea lady, or a sales team. You only have a handful of guys, all needing to do the work of a whole department. We cannot live without the applications that makes us the most productive, efficient versions of ourselves that we can be.

We are constantly investigating and testing new software applications for both our websites, as well as our machines, to see what we can do differently, or better, or more efficiently.

Our shop started out as a Mambo PHP Shop application, a long time ago. We stayed on this application for about a year, before migrating to OSCommerce. Since then, we’ve changed OSCommerce to the degree that it’s nearly impossible to identify it as such. It’s currently only an OSCommerce application by name. It’s a highly customised version, especially on the backend.

The shop software is coded in the PHP language, running on a MySQL database system, via an Apache web server. All these software packages are free, open source options, which means we do not need to purchase them. They are also very popular, which means you get a lot of possible developers for them.

Our forums run on software, called VBulletin and is paid forum software developed by Jelsoft. It is also coded in PHP and runs on the same database and web server software. It is generally regarded as some of the best forum software available on the market today.

We then also have Carbonite Classifieds, which runs on Vbulletin as well, and a few other smaller websites not really worth mentioning.

All of this runs on our own dedicated server, which is a Quad Core Intel CPU, with 16GB of RAM, and a super fast SSD as data hard drive, with a couple of Western Digital RE drives as boot drive and backup drives. We host our server with an ISP, which provides us with our extensive bandwidth at a monthly fee. We currently use upwards of 150GB of bandwidth per month.

Our internet in the office is provided via an 4Mbps ADSL line, with a second line as backup. We use Mweb’s uncapped unshaped 4Mbps ADSL ISP service, and we have 3G on our phones for when we go our of the office and need to work. Currently, we use upwards of 250GB per month in bandwidth. We are about 10 people making use of the ADSL line, in total.

There you have it folks. We’re a technology company, with a heart (and mind) for technology. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and as always, happy shopping!