You might be better suited to swimming with sharks!



Learn Web Hosting Help and Information on mps-web-hosting.com. You might be better suited to swimming with sharks! article will help answer your questions on Web Hosting Help and Information.We at mps-web-hosting.com specialize in Web Hosting Help and Information. Web Hosting Help and Information at mps-web-hosting.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Running a web hosting company is not as easy as it seems, in fact if I had to choose again maybe I would choose swimming with sharks rather than being a web host.

The learning curve for me was huge, so I thought I would share with you what I learned. Firstly you'll need to find a good webhosting company. I'm not going to pretend to recommend anyone in this article; you just need to search hard to find someone that has the right technology, the right bandwidth and the right support.

I ended up choosing a dedicated windows 2003 server with 250 Gb of bandwidth and 80 Gb of hard disk space. I can remote desktop to this server at any time to make any modifications I need which provides great flexability. But with this flexability comes complexity.

Your customers will expect the following from you:
- POP3 email and webmail
- Web site hosting
- FTP access
- Efficient billing
- Excellent support
- Statistics

Providing all of this is not easy and for the important things like statistics or email it's worth paying to get the right tools. If these things break then your customers yell and scream until their fixed.

For email I selected SmarterMail from SmarterTools. This is a great tool that provides POP3 and IMAP support and webmail. It integrates with virus software and SPAM software (with a little work) however it's reliable and easy to use.

I choose to stick with SmarterTools for Statistics and Support software also. These tools are not the cheapest available however they offer a great user experience. I love the support tool especially, and so do my clients. They can send an email to support@yadayada.com and the support request automatically gets routed to the right person who then gets an email. The customer can manage the whole process just by replying to emails which makes it really easy for them. I manage the whole process through a simple web interface and can route requests to the right people responsible for fixing the problem.

The stats software is farily standard, it does have some nice graphics which customers like, and it's built to manage multiple domain names and sites which is perfect for a web host.

Billing is something that took a while to get sorted. Initially I just managed everything in an excel spreadsheet but that very quickly become too hard to manage. I then developed an Access database to help, which I quickly outgrew also. The main problem I found was that both of these solutions needed a human (me) to actually make them work. I needed something that was going to be completely automated. Just on a side note, most of my customers are small businesses looking for some hand-holding; as such they are not the sort of customer to 'sign-up' on a website for hosting. In fact that's not the product we really offer anyway.

Today I am running with an open source billing system called phpCOIN. This software allows me to set up recurring invoices that automatically get sent as they roll around. The new version to be released this year will actually deliver a PDF email which I'm sure my customers will like even more. This filled a huge void.

The final part in making all of this work was learning all about DNS. When I started this business I understood the concepts but had never actually made it work. I know what a DNS server did, but not really how. This is the one thing that can really screw you around if you get it wrong, because your customers are the first people on the phone when their website is down or the email is broken.

I would recommend a great deal of research in this area to ensure you are not in over your head. Once you learn about A records and MX records however, it really quite simple. There are many sites offering advice in this area, and I would head to some forums to get your questions answered quickly.

So am I happy to doing this? To be honest I love it! Running this system gives me the power to built websites on the fly, not only for my customers but for myself and my family also. And I know that the only person I need to rely on is me.


HomeTypers.com - Earn 75% Commission! - Get Paid Typing Data! Affiliates Now Earn 75% Commission @ $34 Per Sale! Converting Better Than Ever!
Memory Training For Students. - Students will learn how to remembering information taught in school. Study less and still get better grades. Audio program.

If you've ever had a severe drop in your Google rankings in search results, you may think of Google more of an enemy than an ally. But if you knew what I do, you'd realize that there are tools provided by the search engine that help you learn more about your traffic, and may even help drive visitors to your site.

Here are five ways that Google provides free traffic assistance.

#1 - Google will Help Your Pages Get Discovered with Google Sitemaps

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Google Sitemaps is a program that gives you the opportunity to present your site's pages to Google in XML or text. Google will then come by and spider the...



Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31


More Articles:


1. How to find Cheap Web Hosting services
Web hosting refers to an Internet hosting service that offers online systems to different users for storing any kind of information like video, images etc. It's not so difficult to find these services at cheap rates but there are certain things that should be keep in mind while looking for cheap web hosting services. You can easily find cheap web hosting service provider with careful research. Users should find the best as well as cheap service provider that satisfies their requirements. You sho…

2. Inexpensive Web Hosting
Selecting an inexpensive web hosting service provider can be confusing. Providers are full of claims that they may or may not adhere too. Finding a quality service provider that is affordable is a tedious task. However, there are features that you should consider when selecting your web-hosting provider. Price Consideration Naturally, price will be your first consideration. If this is your first website, and money is an issue, you will want the best service for your dollar and within your budget…

3. E mail web hosting services
Your web site is critical to your business. It is only through a professional and interactive website that you can stay ahead of your competition. If your web site goes down, you lose revenue. If your site performs too slowly, customers will go somewhere else. And to make sure that it does not happen you have to choose a web hosting company that provides you the most reliable web hosting services. It is only when your are rest assured that your web site is up and running smoothly that you can co…

4. Cheap Web hosting - The Things you Never Knew
There are not many things you need to consider when you want cheap web hosting. Mainly there is one: PRICE. You want to save as much money as you can... and that's about it. But hold on for a second. What if cheaper means that you'll loose money? Would you consider it then? Ok, this is what I mean. I'm definitely all in favor of getting great things at cheap prices, and if you are here this means you are as well. There is just one thing that can be better than cheap web hosting, and that is Gr…