HostEntrepreneur

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!

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.

Logical Volumes are one of the cool technologies that finally made it to Linux.  LVMs present your filesystems with a virtual (or logical) drive to use that may reside on one or more physical volumes.  Once you start working with LVMs you’ll never want to go back. How about the ability to extend or reduce their size? Or my personal favorite, the ability to snapshot a filesystem, which is like taking a picture (a snapshot) of how it looked at a point in time.  This is done through some “trickery” with a snapshot volume that holds the real writes to the snapshotted volume on a separate LVM.  You can then backup the snapshotted LVM without worrying about if changes are being made to the filesystem. When you un-snapshot the LVM, all the writes are committed to the real LVM. As far as the applications thinks, the filesystem is business as usual. And unlike splitting mirrors, you 1) keep your redundancy intact 2) its MUCH faster and 3) you only need space to hold the writes.

But there are times you need to modify a filesystem.  For example, you may need to reduce or extend a Logical Volume on a system…  Say we have a /vz filesystem and we want to reduce it to 500GB to open some unused space for something else.

1. Backup your data – this is ALWAYS step 1.
2. umount /vz
3. e2fsck -f /dev/Volgroup##/LogVol##    … where the #’s are the logical volume group and volume numbers for /vz
4. resize2fs /dev/VolGroup##/LogVol##   500GB  … same ##’s as above
5. lvreduce -L 500GB /dev/VolGroup/LogVol##  … do I need to say it?
6. e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup/LogVol##    …. just for good measure
7. mount /vz   … or mount -a

One of the things you may need to develop, and we probably all stand to improve it some, is time management. This is true even more so for small business owners. There are many methods or techniques to explore, and I plan on going through some of them with you, but today I want to show you the method I like best. It’s commonly referred to as the “Eisenhower method” after the President who used this technique.

It’s a simple method, and works well for managing many aspects. Divide everything up based on the above table into 1 of the 4 quadrants.

1:  Important and Urgent – These are the fires! Put them out right away!
2:  Important but Not Urgent – These are important, but don’t need addressing now. Schedule them for later.
3:  Not Important but Urgent – Delegate these to someone else. Have them do them now.
4:  Not Important and Not Important – Iif you can’t do everything, these are the ones not to do.

Your attention as a small business owner should be on the tasks in boxes 1 and 2 primarily, and sometimes on 3. The 4′s are the ones to ignore for now. They may be “nice to haves” or “nice to dos”, but the time they take is taking away from the more important and/or more urgent matters. Leave them on the list for a while, but don’t be afraid to let them go if need be.

Also realize that items can move from one quadrant to another, especially between 2 to 1, 4 to 3, and 4 to 2 . But they almost never go from a 4 to 1 directly. They almost always go over only 1 direction at a time, either between Urgent and Not, or between Important and Not. Often things move from one to the other because of being neglected, at which time they become either more important or more urgent, and rarely both.

So you may ask yourself, if I’m focusing on the 1s, why not just ignore the rest? Because almost no task can be completed in 1 session. Often you will find yourself blocked by some outside force that limits what you can work on and actually make progress.  Don’t work on something that you’re not going to be able to move forward on, just because it’s a 1.  If you can take care of a 2 or a few of them, you’ve moved forward more than working on a 1 and not going anyway with it.

FTP is just not secure by itself. So if you value your server’s securely you simply won’t use it for uploading or editing your site. We highly recommend a program like WinSCP, http://winscp.net/eng/index.php,  to upload or edit your site. WinSCP can use your editing PuTTY key pairs with SSH to get to your server. This is MUCH more secure, and you never expose your password.  

We do recommend that you make changes to you site’s files on your local machine and then upload them (with WinSCP) all at once.  But what if you need to make a change on the fly? Sure you could log in with PuTTY and use vi,vim, nano, or one of a dozen other editors. But WinSCP can help you out there too.   You can use your existing Windows based editor with WinSCP. Personally, I love EditPlus, http://www.editplus.com/, it’s small fast and has a lot of features. But it doesn’t work over SSH (at least not last time I looked anyway).

First, setup WinSCP to get to your server like you normally would. It will need the FQDN or ip address, port number (you’re not using 22 anymore right?), your login, and your key file.  Go ahead and save the session… Now on the left side tree menu, select Preferences, and then select the Preferences… button, and a new window should appear with new left side tree navigation.  A few down, there is a leaf called a Editors, select that. It should look like this:

Click the Add button.  Select the External Editor radio box, then click Browse. Find the path to your editor, in my case that was c”\Program Files (x86)\Edit Plus 3\editplus.exe - you’re may be different depending on OS version and what program you want to use. Under editor autoselection, you might want to change the association, say EditPlus for php files or .conf files. There’s another option there too… Inside the Add dialob box, there’s an “Associated Application” – then specify the type of files you want opened with your default Windows application for that extension. For example, I use CorelDraw for .cdr and .psd files, and Windows will automatically open CorelDraw for me if I double-click in Explorer. With the Associated Application radio box, that is extended into WinSCP as well.  So inside of WinSCP if I double-click a .cdr or .psd file, CorelDraw opens automatically, and when I click save it is transferred back to the server. This is even great for using different types of editors for different files.

You probably need to change the order in which programs are checked in the list. WinSCP goes from top to bottom until it finds an editor it can use for the file. So I’d put “Associated application” at the top, then your prefered text editor(s), then WinSCP’s internal editor at the bottom.

Sometimes, you’ll have issues with backup copies that programs make, or you may just want to keep them saved locally… Sometimes this is easily accomplished. For EditPlus, go to Preferences, then Files. There is a checkbox called “Create backup file when saving”, check it if it’s not. Then hit the button next to it “Backup Options”, select your local backup directory, and check the “Create backup file of remote file in backup directory” box. And you should be good to go.

Caution… As with any changes to a system, before you use this for real (ie a real configuration file that matters to you), create a dummy file out in a directory you don’t care about, and TEST it. Make some changes to that file. Check that it works as you expect BEFORE using this for real production files. Of course, best of all is to not use this on production files directly, but to edit them locally then transfer when you’re sure they’re right, but as you know life doesn’t always work that way.

.. Or why you should pay attention to your use of grammar, style, and punctuation in your  correspondence.

I’m often amazed how some will complain about not being taken seriously or referred to as a “kiddie host”, those hosts stated typically by teenagers that get into hosting thinking they’ll make millions sitting at their desk while doing homework. There are some great hosts started by young people, HotGator was started while Brent Oxley was in college. He dropped out and went to work full time for his company. So, yes, even ”kiddie hosts” can be taken seriously and make a success of it.

I suspect that part of the problem is they manner in which younger folks will communicate in their day to day business dealings.  If I was looking for a provider and started a chat session, and got something along the lines of “How r u?”, I would say that it would be hard for the company to regain the trust that they were a serious host that they just lost.  You may be thinking that it’s “not fair”, or “shouldn’t matter”, but the fact is that it does. There’s no face, no intonation in the voice, no firm handshake so to speak with purely internet based dealings. So any little reason is brought to the forefront.  In this case, if they’re too lazy to type 4 extra keys, one begins to wonder what else are they too lazy to do?

You may not agree with this thinking, and that’s fine. However, others are going to judge you and your company based on your writings in chat, forums, company website, and emails. So you need to adjust your thinking and take the time, and care, to represent yourself and company in a professional manner if you are wanting your new hosting business seriously. I’m not saying you have to be a “grammar nazi”, there’s no need for that. Minor mispellings, slightly off grammar, and some incorrect capitalization isn’t going to have the same effect as using “u” instead of you, “r” for are, or a sentence in an ad like “hi come try our services we r the bestest in world we beat all pricez wit unlimited space and traffic we hav l33t h0st1n t00″. That would be fine on some forums, perhaps some frequented by the apparently intended market, but on the more respected forums such a WebHostingTalk, that ad just isn’t going to fly.

What is “premium bandwidth”?   If you’re searching for hosting, vps, dedicated servers, colocation, etc., chances are you’ve run across the terms “premium” and “mixed” bandwidth. But what does it mean? And what if it isn’t premium or mixed?

Basically there are 2 recognized levels of bandwidth: premium, and not – which we’ll call “value” bandwidth. Often value bandwidth is Cogent. They provide a lot of bandwidth to a lot of providers and do it at a very reasonable rate.  Cogent is huge… not that the other’s aren’t. But they are the number 1 name that pops up talking about value grade bandwidth.

Permium bandwidth, on the other hand, is made up of Tier 1 providers like: AT&T, Sprint, Saavis, Level 3, etc. These are the REALLY BIG boys with large international networks at very high speeds.  Look into these networks if you ever want to put your home cable or even FIOS in perspective.

So that’s 2 types… Premium and Value, but you often see “Mixed” as well. Simple, it just a combination of the 2. Done right, it can be the best of both worlds, better pricing, and better connectivity as well.  Typically, if you’re seeing either a dedicated or shared unmetered connection it’s probably going either be or at least have come value bandwidth in there, if not all. I’d look for a mixed bandwidth connection unless you absolutely need 100% pure premium bandwidth, and if you had read this article to find out what it was, you don’t.

cPanel has an option to cluster cPanel servers for DNS services. This allows you to have a true secondary, or tertiary, or… , dns server for your cPanel based hosts. This option is called Clustering and is installed but turned off on the default installation. But fortunately, the it is easily enabled. And if you don’t have a second cPanel server, cPanel offers a freely licensed “DNS Only” version. This is basically just the dns portion of the software… but for clustering acts the same as a standard cPanel server does.  If you want the DNS Only version it can be obtained here: http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/related-server-software.html

Step 1 – Get your 2nd cPanel server (or cPanel DNS-Only server) up and running… we’ll call it “ns2″, assuming “ns1″ is on the main server.
Step 2 – Log into ns2′s WHM at http://your.ip.address:2087/  with your root password
Step 3 – Under ”Cluster/Remote Access” on the left side, select “Configure Cluster”
Step 4 – Under “Modify Cluster Status”, enable dns clustering if it is disabled.
Step 5 – Back under “Cluster/Remote Access” select “Setup Remote Access Key”.
Step 6 – Go ahead and “Generate New Key” for some reason I’ve had trouble with the existing key the 1st time.
Step 7 – Copy the Current Access Key, make sure you select the WHOLE KEY … scroll down to get it all.
Step 8 – Log in to ns1′s WHM with your root password
Step 9 – Under ”Cluster/Remote Access” on the left side, select “Configure Cluster”
Step 10 – Under “Modify Cluster Status”, enable dns clustering if it is disabled.
Step 11 – Under the Servers in your cluster section, add the ip address of ns2 and click configure.
Step 12 – When prompted for the access key, paste the whole key into the box.
Step 13 – Back under “Configure Cluster” your new ns2 should now be listed, change the Role to “Synchronize Changes” to start sending dns to that server.
Step 14 – Under “DNS Functions” on the left pane, select “Synchronize DNS Records” to push existing records to the new server.
Step 15 – You should now be able to query the new nameserver with nslookup for existing domains that you serve.
Step 16 – If all went well, update your registrar with the new name and ip address of your new secondary nameserver.

 This is the perfect application for a small vps… We even offer a secondary cPanel dns only vps service that we install it for you, and only handles dns for a rather reduced rate of $5.95/month at Lagniappe Internet, http://www.LagniappeInternet.com/ . Perfect for vps resellers who don’t want the expense of maintaining their own secondary cPanel server but want the redundancy of a real secondary dns server.

First, let me apologize for the late post… I thought I had a post scheduled for today but missed it. I’ll try not to do that again… but no guarantees – life happens!

For new hosts, this is probably not on your list of high priority items, but it should be! Every host, or every business for that matter, should have a stated refund policy.  Plus that policy should be publicly available. The reason being is it makes the issue when (and it is when not if) a refund request comes up, you can simply refer back to the policy for how to handle it.  You should put some thought into it now, and not have to think about it when it finally does happen. And actually as a newer host, it is more likely to happen sooner than later. 

Of course there will always be exceptions, and you should account for that in the policy itself… for “unusual circumstances”. It should not be your way of getting out of giving a refund without cause. But if you say that there’s a 30 day money back guarantee, you should honor it. But personally if the user knowingly abused the service, and your Terms of Service permits it, a refund is not warranted. But notice the TOS reference… your stated refund policy should reference accounts terminated for TOS violations and how they will be “normally” handled – if there is such a thing as a “normal TOS violation”.  Ideally it should be a part of the TOS itself. So that customers explicitly agree to it on sign up… You are having them agree by checkbox, or other method right?

Having a stated refund policy helps build trust in your new hosting company. It shows the customer that you are thinking things through… That you are flying by the seat of your pants… You have a plan, and are working it.

One of the other benefits is when a customer leaves, voluntarily or not, when they want a refund and start the threats, etc. You can refer to your refund policy. If you don’t have one, you’re at somewhat of a disadvantage should it go any further than the threats. Payment providers will want to know the terms that the customer agreed to, and if it’s not spelled out, it may mean that you will lose any challenge.

So go ahead and start working on your refund policy if you don’t have one already. Or review the one you have… You want this in place sooner rather than later.

The more you can make your customers self sufficient the less time you need to answer the same questions over and over. That leads to more time available for other things such as building services, finding new customers, etc.  That’s why we all start working on Knowledgebase (KB) building pretty quickly. But some people aren’t good at visualizing. That is they don’t take written instructions and mentally translate that into what they will see and do. Others do… For the ones that do,  knowledgebase articles work great. I’m one of those people. I’d rather a short KB instruction and then I can go do it… Others need to be shown. That’s where DemoWolf hosting video tutorials comes in.

DemoWolf has over 3600 ready made tutorials for practically any hosting related subject you’d want. Not only are there the normal cPanel, WHM, DirectAdmin, etc. but other subjects such as PuTTY, Paypal, and transfering domain names. They have tutorials that are textual with pictures (think pop up video  but instructional not comical) as well as with voice-over.

I highly recommend DemoWolf tutorials… We’ve just recently started to use them ourselves and are getting positive feedback already. Check out their site at http://www.DemoWolf.com   and check out the bundles and save 50% or more. If you have questions, I’m sure you will find them most helpful as well.