HostEntrepreneur

So you want to start your own webhosting business… Should you choose “reseller hosting”? And what is it? Numerous options exist to get started selling hosting as a side or primary business. But like everything there are trade-offs, things to consider, and “gotchas” to watch out for… In part 1 of our new Getting Start series, I’m going to talk about what is “reseller hosting”, who it is right for (and not), and what to look for.

Reseller hosting is a shared server setup, meaning your accounts will be placed on the same server as others from other customers. This is probably the number one thing to watch out for with reseller hosting. Since you have no control over the other customers, or their customers, you have to be able to trust that the provider is setting things up properly, securely and and monitoring/maintaining the server and network properly.  Things could go wrong if not done properly… insecure setups can lead to others getting to your data, a spammer could get onto the server leading to blacklisting, or an account could suck up all the bandwidth or cpu resources. These are just a couple examples of what could go wrong. Since you’re not in control of the server, you need to be able to rely on the provider to watch for it and fix it quickly should it happen.

Leaving the server administration is also one of the biggest advantages as well. This is especially true for new hosts who probably don’t have the experience or manpower to administer servers on their own. It is also considerably cheaper to go the reseller route. A decent reseller account can be had complete with control panel, possibly some billing software to handle collections from your customers, installation script, etc. for $10 to $15 per month.

When looking for a reseller account, be aware of the disk space and traffic (often incorrectly call bandwidth) that are included. Some reseller accounts can get so large in these stats that they rival small VPS accounts. When choosing you want to selection on that meets your needs and provides some growth room. You also want to make sure that the provider will upgrade the account without having to migrate and without penalty.

A nice feature, if you can get it, is a dedicated ip address or two for your accounts. This does a couple things for you. One it limits the impact if a spammer gets onto the server. Blacklists usually are at the single ip level unless it’s so rampant on a network that they block the whole network. It also does something else… The larger hosts probably have multiple physical servers.  By having your accounts to a single ip address, migrating the account, say for load balancing the servers, becomes significantly easier WITHOUT changing ip address. If your account shares ips with other accounts, that option is out the window…

If you’re serious about growing your business, a reseller account is a good way to get started with minimal cost.  But be sure to check with the company that they will support you should you need to move up to a vps or dedicated servers. That dedicated ip address can help there too. Once the vps is up and running they can copy the data over and move the ip to the new server. We’re talking minutes of downtime… a lot easier than if you had to backup the accounts, download the backup, upload to the new server and then change dns, and potentially wait hours for dns cache to die.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here to ask or email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com

Money is one of the most important thing which everyone thinks about while considering to use a dedicated web server host, no matter what business they own. Cash is the most important factor of al the businesses. The best Linux Dedicated Server statistical distributions is having a good advantage that you don’t need to pay extra amount of money for any software package that Microsoft introduce. So this can help you to invest your budget on the hardware or any other important thing which can help you a lot in your project.

The most important thing that comes to my mind and you should also know about it is it’s trustworthiness and safety are really well documented when having a talk about Linux Dedicated Servers. They are well known to keep running for months, giving consistent performance and you need to forget only one thing, that is maintenance.

When you are thinking about normal servers that run on normally used servers or even thinking about coded software, one thing you should always keep in my mind is that, Linux always performs much better and longer than other and this is the most important think you need to think about when it comes on something that will stand the test of time. For people who are working from home and using a in house server, crash occasionally and need to reboot is not a big deal and what to keep in mind is that when it comes on talking about some one who is running a business online, this can be terrible and they may loose thousands of dollars on a single day when there website goes down.

They occasionally route the problem by having a ghost server running an exact duplicate of website on the same server but with different hardware, and what will happen if the main web host and all its channels are affected, and if your ghost server is build on a same hardware and what if there could be a universal crash and loose all the data that is inside together with any transactions or any type of financial information as well and this is really very important. So you need to have a server that are reliable, provide some security to the customers on who are running a e-commerce site.

These are all the reasons you should think about “Why you should use Linux Dedicated Server?” One more thing that you should know is that Linux Server is able to communicate with a host of operating systems pretty easily and efficiently, and this a good when you need to connect the server with other platforms to configure a network where business can really operate.

CTOEdge has published an interesting article on migrating to cloud computing… it’s written from a business perspective, but it is definitely relative to our industry as well. These are the things you want to be up on when talking to your customers about standard server based hosting vs. cloud hosting. I recommend that all hosts read it…

“The Long and Short of Assessing Cloud Computing Providers”
http://www.ctoedge.com/content/long-and-short-assessing-cloud-computing-providers

Straight from the horse’s mouth…

 

What: V7Network RoundTable
Where: http://www.v7n.com/chat/
When: Wednesday Oct 7 at 1:00 pm and an encore session at 7:00PM CDT
Discussion: How to identify problem areas on your web site.
Cost: FREE to all V7N members.

Win A Free Listing In The V7N Directory For Attending Our First RoundTable Live Chat!
 

 

 
“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″
 
As many of you already know, our first attempt with this service crashed down around our feet when we experienced unforeseen technical difficulties. Those issues (knock on wood) have now been corrected and we are ready to get to hit the ground running offering V7Network RoundTable live training chats to the community. To thank you for your patience, we’ll be giving every person that attends a discount coupon for the V7N Directory! And two lucky winners will get free directory listings!
 
These will be structured interactive text chats covering a wide range of topics for webmasters and small business owners, focused 100% on helping our members build a highly successful online presence. At this time, our plan is to offer this training 2-4 times a month based on the response from the community.
 
The next live training chat is scheduled for October 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm CDT. We will be discussing ways to evaluate your site (and the tools that I personally use) to determine what types of changes you may need to consider making in terms of SEO and marketing techniques. Afterward, we will be opening things up for questions and answers. We will repeat the session that night at 7:00 pm CDT.
 
If what you are currently doing is working, please do not consider changing a single thing. In fact, you probably don’t need this type of training. If however you find yourself not getting the results that you have hoped for, then perhaps it is time to think about sitting down and spending some time with us at the V7Network RoundTable and see if maybe we can brainstorm through some ideas for you!
 
We will open the chat area approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the training session. If you are not already logged in, you will need to log in using your V7N user name and password. I expect the training session to last 1-2 hours, based on the number of member questions.
 
 
 Please let us know if you will be able to attend!

The other day I blogged about tynt.com’s tracer program and how to stop it from annoying you while browsing. The idea behind it makes sense to a lot of web publishers. You don’t want people ripping off your content. But the post the other day pointed out how easy it is to get around these measures.

Google has a feature called Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts, which lets you find content and emails it to you. I strongly recommend that you set up alerts for your domain name, and company name at a minimum, and get them emailed to you as they happen. This lets you keep on top of what people are saying about your company.

It would be trivial to include a fairly unique phrase into pages you are wanting to try to protect. Then setup an alert for that phrase and have Google email you. Sure you may get some false positives, but provided the phrase is unique enough, it should be few and far between. Remember to use double quotes, like “this is my phrase” so that google doesn’t match “this website is not the same as my website, even though it has the same words as my phrase“. See how all the words are there, but it’s not the phrase.  And it could miss a copied page if they did enough editing on the copied content. But since these people are basically lazy, they won’t edit the page much if at all. So it should catch the majority of them.  Catching the others probably won’t happen with the other “solutions” either if they’re modifying the content that much.

Recently I’ve seen a few people refer to their domain name, like “myname.com” as a “top level domain” or TLD. The short answer is that it is NOT a TLD. The term Top Level Domain has a very specific meaning, and anything you can register does not fit the definition… Per RFC 920,

The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains.  The top level domains are subdivided into second level domains.  The second level domains may be subdivided  into third level domains, and so on.
…

While the initial domain name “ARPA” arises from the history of the   development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like “government”, “education”, or “commercial”.  The motivation is to provide an   organization name that is free of undesirable semantics.

Notice their words: “top level names will be very general categories…”  Recognize the categories listed, it’s .gov, .edu and .com TLDs. There are also ccTLDs with are country specific such as .us and .ca for the USA and Canada respectively. As of this moment right now, here are ALL OF the top level domains per IANA:

AC, AD, AE, AERO, AF, AG, AI, AL, AM, AN, AO, AQ, AR, ARPA, AS, ASIA, AT, AU, AW, AX, AZ, BA, BB, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BIZ, BJ, BM, BN, BO, BR, BS, BT, BV, BW, BY, BZ, CA, CAT, CC, CD, CF, CG, CH, CI, CK, CL, CM, CN, CO, COM, COOP, CR, CU, CV, CX, CY, CZ, DE, DJ, DK, DM, DO, DZ, EC, EDU, EE, EG, ER, ES, ET, EU, FI, FJ, FK, FM, FO, FR, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, GG, GH, GI, GL, GM, GN, GOV, GP, GQ, GR, GS, GT, GU, GW, GY, HK, HM, HN, HR, HT, HU, ID, IE, IL, IM, IN, INFO, INT, IO, IQ, IR, IS, IT, JE, JM, JO, JOBS, JP, KE, KG, KH, KI, KM, KN, KP, KR, KW, KY, KZ, LA, LB, LC, LI, LK, LR, LS, LT, LU, LV, LY, MA, MC, MD, ME, MG, MH, MIL, MK, ML, MM, MN, MO, MOBI, MP, MQ, MR, MS, MT, MU, MUSEUM, MV, MW, MX, MY, MZ, NA, NAME, NC, NE, NET, NF, NG, NI, NL, NO, NP, NR, NU, NZ, OM, ORG, PA, PE, PF, PG, PH, PK, PL, PM, PN, PR, PRO, PS, PT, PW, PY, QA, RE, RO, RS, RU, RW, SA, SB, SC, SD, SE, SG, SH, SI, SJ, SK, SL, SM, SN, SO, SR, ST, SU, SV, SY, SZ, TC, TD, TEL, TF, TG, TH, TJ, TK, TL, TM, TN, TO, TP, TR, TRAVEL, TT, TV, TW, TZ, UA, UG, UK, US, UY, UZ, VA, VC, VE, VG, VI, VN, VU, WF, WS, XN–0ZWM56D, XN–11B5BS3A9AJ6G, XN–80AKHBYKNJ4F, XN–9T4B11YI5A, XN–DEBA0AD, XN–G6W251D, XN–HGBK6AJ7F53BBA, XN–HLCJ6AYA9ESC7A, XN–JXALPDLP, XN–KGBECHTV, XN–ZCKZAH, YE, YT, YU, ZA, ZM, ZW

So unless you somehow managed to register one of those (not a domain WITHIN one of those but one of those actual TLDs), you don’t have a TLD… It’s not open for discussion, you don’t. You have a “second level domain” according to the people who designed the dns system. Please stop telling people you do, or trying to sell a TLD. You just sound stupid to people who know better.

What a simplistic title huh?  But lets look closer at it…

I recently was in a discussion with someone who had made a political statement about a proposed law and I didn’t agree. This isn’t the proper forum for the discussion, I have a couple others better suited for that. When I presented an opposing viewpoint, I was told that I misunderstood the “intent” of the bill. This sent me back to day one of the a business law course at a prestigious university I attended. This professor was a lawyer as well. He walked in and stated very plainly that if we remember anything then remember this “Words have meanings”.  His point was “intent” is very rarely ever considered in law. And if a lawyer wrote it, you can forget about the stated intent… the wording used will have been chosen for a very specific reason. Once a law is passed, the intent is all but irrelevant. It is the wording that we must live with, not they claimed they were trying to do.

Now to bring this back into light… any agreements you have with your customers, suppliers, or even the public in general, you need to be very aware of the wording you use. And you need to be willing to be bound to the meaning of the words. If you intended something else, you needed to state something else.  Another point to remember, a lot of times businessmen think like amateur lawyers… they’ll try to say one thing and make you think they’re saying another. Be on guard for that… This is one of the reasons we pick the providers we do… We like to work with “real people” instead.

When choosing a hosting partner, what is the most important thing to consider? Price? Feature? Disk Space? Bandwidth?  I’d say it’s none of these… the single most important feature you need to consider is partner themselves. You should be asking: Are they open with their customers? Do they treat their customers like numbers, or partners? Are they honest? Most importantly… Is this a company you are going to want to stay connected to for the long term?

All the other questions, bandwidth, price, features, etc. are details that can be addressed. None of them should factor into a decision to partner with them or not, provided none of them are out of line. But then if they are out of line with industry norms, they’re probably not going to measure up well with the other questions anyway.

Things to look for include checking that they have (and update) a customer news/announcements site or forum. You should also ask the support crew a question or two before signing up. It doesn’t have to anything special or even difficult. What you are looking for is a timely, courteous and accurate answer. One of my early customers asked a question he already knew the answer to… JUST to see if we’d be straightfoward in the answer. And they’re still a customer today.

Just a quick update but an important one at that… Buy.com and Godaddy.com are offering a special on .COM domain names… See http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx?sssdmh=dm5.157776&isc=299buycom  and click the yellow box on the left for details. There are some restrictions (no paypal, new or transfer only, etc.)

HostEntrepreneur.com has been getting a pretty decent response and we want to keep the drive alive. The past several days have been very busy for me – new ad coming out in Ping! magazine with the next issue, lots of work to do, as well as some personal development plans all underway.

I’ve mentioned this before and had several people express interest but not follow through, so I’m putting it back out there… if you would like to write for http://HostEntrepreneur.com/  we would love to hear from you. We’re looking for business and technical writers who love to share with and teach others about the industry.  There is a bit of small monetary compensation as we do require exclusive content. Plus you also get an “About the author” section, where you can also put a link back to your site (even if it competes with one of ours … this site is about teaching and helping others, all are welcome).  So if you’re interested register here, so you can send me a message…

And rest assured we’ll be returning to our “regularly scheduled programming” shortly.