Feb

16

Frequently Asked Web Hosting Questions

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Congratulations! After much thought and consideration, you finally took the plunge and decided it was time to have your own web site. That’s a great accomplishment in itself. However, now you’re left with another daunting task — selecting a quality web host.

Selecting a good web host is of the utmost importance. However, with all of the technical mumbo jumbo, knowing what to look for can be very intimidating to say the least.

For this reason, I have devised a list of the most frequently asked web hosting questions.

Question: I’m not exactly sure what a web host is. Can you please explain?

Answer: A web host is a company that provides you with server space for your web site. This includes all of the files associated with your web site. When your web address is typed into a browser, the web host displays your pages.

Question: Is it true that a good web host will cost me a lot of money each month?

Answer: Although the old adage “you get what you pay for” still holds true, there are many quality web hosts that are reasonably priced. You can expect to pay $20 - $50 a month for up to 50MB of space depending on the company and your specific needs.

Question: I have been considering hosting my site with a free hosting company, but I’m a little concerned with their reliability. Can you shed some light?

Answer: NEVER host an ecommerce web site with a free hosting
service. These services are highly unreliable and could care less if your site goes down. Their main concern is with their advertisers. As long as their ads are up and running, for the most part, they could care less about you or your site.

In addition, sites hosted with free services look very unprofessional. If you’ve taken the time to get your own web site designed and your own domain name, why would you risk your success and host with a free service? It’s just not worth it.

Question: I’m at my wits end. I’ve been to so many hosting companies and am completely overwhelmed. I have no idea what
company to go with. Can you please tell me what I should be looking for in a good host?

Answer: Selecting a quality hosting company can be an intimidating process. Your first consideration should be the company.

• Do they offer fast connections?
• Do they have a back-up system in place to protect your
data in case there is a power outage?
• Do they require you to make payments in advance?
• Do they require a long-term contract?
• Do they charge set up fees?
• How is their customer support? Test them.
• Do they provide you with free access to a secure server
for order processing?
• Do they offer shopping cart software to process
your orders?
• Do they provide you with an online Web Site Manager?
• Do they provide you with an online support manual?

Ask for references. Talk with some of their customers and ask them if they have been satisfied.

Here are some basic features you should look for when
selecting a web host:

1) 24/7 reliable tech support
2) Your own domain name (www.yourname.com)
3) At least 10GB of monthly transfer (traffic)
4) A minimum of 20MB - 50MB of server space
5) Unlimited true POP email accounts - name@yourdomain.com
6) Unlimited email aliases
7) Email forwarding
8) Unlimited autoresponders
9) Your own unrestricted CGI-Bin
10) Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
11) MySQL Database
12) Perl
13) htaccess password protection
14) Server Side Includes (SSI) support
15) Design (and upload to) your site using Netscape or
other HTML editing software
16) Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for those
utilizing FrontPage
17) Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
18) Easy access to your log files
19) Statistics on visits to your site
20) Referral Program

When selecting a web host, you must look at the entire
picture prior to making your decision. You may find a host
that charges $5.00 - $15.00 a month to host your site,
however, their technical support may be poor, or your web
site may be slow or down a lot.

A lower monthly payment may look appealing, but how much is
it actually going to cost you in lost sales? Most likely much more than the amount you’ll save.

Feb

16

Hosted Exchange: build in-house or use private label?

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Businesses of all sizes are looking at ways to drive efficiencies and are increasingly moving towards hosted options, particularly hosted Microsoft Exchange. The analyst group Radicati suggests that Microsoft Exchange will have 200 million users by 2009, so as a Web hosting company it’s a great opportunity for you to increase revenues from existing customers, as well as to attract new customers.

The question is whether it is more beneficial for you to build and maintain the infrastructure in-house or use a private label service to deliver hosted products to your customers.

The hosted services you’ll deliver are business critical applications such as email, so it is essential that they are always available to your customers without any extended downtime. In order to guarantee this, it is critical that you start with the correct hardware and software, and that it is configured, maintained and supported by trained personnel.

In addition, the hosting environment must be kept up-to-date and under the correct conditions. Your customers will also need to know that their data is safe and that they can get help if they have a problem, no matter what time of day or night it is. This often makes support a deciding factor.

To build your own in-house infrastructure, you will need a capital investment of up to $100,000, and you can expect to continue to pay for running costs and upgrades. Building and maintaining an in-house infrastructure also requires experience, planning and a highly skilled team to make sure that everything is managed efficiently.

Using a private label service means that all of this is taken care of for you: there are no up-front costs of buying and configuring the hardware and software; there are no ongoing upgrade or maintenance costs; and the service provider manages the Exchange environment, security and backup 24×7.

All you have to do is sell the service and provide tier-one support for basic problems customers may encounter, such as mailbox creation, email access and updating their DNS – most service providers will also offer tier-one training for your support teams. Any tier-two (technical) problems and inquiries can be escalated to the service provider, where they will be dealt with by a specialist support team.

In order to sell hosted Exchange to customers with confidence, you need to know that the service is reliable and secure. Your service provider should be able to give you this confidence. Our private label services, for example, are run in the latest Class A datacenters with N+1 redundancy, which are designed to create the optimum environment for servers and other hardware. This includes redundant power feeds, uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators, cooling and the latest security. The state-of-the-art systems are also designed so that there’s no one single point of failure, which means that they are incredibly reliable and can offer a minimum of 99.9 percent uptime.

Further, access to servers is restricted to a limited number of authorized engineers and security is strictly enforced using the very latest technology, including video surveillance, motion sensors and controlled ID key-cards, as well as security guards stationed at every entrance to the site.
In terms of selling to customers, private label programs often have services that are completely customizable, so you can match all color schemes, wording and logos to your company’s other assets. Some suppliers also offer professional Exchange marketing collateral designed for easy re-branding and even run joint business planning programs with partners.

As a result, you can now offer customers the best products that allow them to take advantage of enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange email and collaboration tools for a low per mailbox monthly fee, without the cost of buying, running and supporting the hardware and software yourself. There’s simply no reason to do it in-house.

Feb

16

Features of Microsoft Exchange 2007

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Microsoft Exchange 2007 is the new version of Microsoft’s market-leading Exchange email server. It simplifies communications, improves your ability to share information and increases message security and compliance.

Exchange 2007 is the most advanced messaging solution available, with full email, contacts, calendaring and wireless access capabilities. However, it is expensive to buy and install – over $10,000, even for smaller companies.

The most cost-effective way to implement the Exchange 2007 server for a small or midsized organization is to use an Exchange hosting provider. This will allow you to benefit from the new features, without paying the upfront costs of building an Exchange server in-house or having to maintain the server in the future.

Here are some of the new features of Exchange 2007:

Simplified and Integrated Communications

• Exchange 2007 allows you to customize your Out of Office messages through improved options, such as setting distinct messages for internal and external contacts.

• The Autodiscover feature will allow you to set up your Exchange account to the Outlook client quickly and easily – all you have to do is enter your email address and password and you’ll be started in minutes.

• Instant search will help you to locate information from any part of your Inbox by letting you search your e-mail (including attachments), contacts, tasks and calendar all at once.

• Unified Messaging lets you receive and access email, voicemail and faxes all in one place – your inbox.

Share Information and Schedule Meetings

• The sharing and meeting-scheduling tools of Exchange 2007 allow you to share calendars, task folders, contact lists and other information with colleagues and request to see the recipient’s information at the same time, allowing for improved group collaboration.

• Improved security levels for sharing govern who can view your schedule. You may provide access on a case-by-case basis and set different levels of permissions as you choose.

• The new Exchange 2007 Scheduling Assistant suggests the best time for a meeting based on the desired attendees’ schedules and even takes into account resource availability.

• The Booking Attendant easily allows you to schedule resources for your meetings by making it simple to search for and find available conference rooms or other resources.

Increased Message Security and Compliance

• Integrated security technologies provide the latest in active messaging protection to stop unwanted spam and viruses from entering your inbox.

• The new E-Mail Postmark technology manages email legitimacy by applying a token to email messages it sends as a check for the reliability of incoming messages.

Feb

16

What does hosted Exchange mean for Web hosting companies?

Filed Under Companies, General Issues, Hosting Software, Security Issues, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Web hosting is a difficult industry, with prices and customer loyalty both on the decline. Most Web hosting companies are expanding their service offerings to fight these trends, and many of them are looking to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange services.

Research confirms that the vast majority of small businesses do not have sophisticated email, with mobile access and sharing of calendars, contacts and files. This leaves enormous growth potential for an offering that meets those needs.

The challenge for Web hosts, however, is the same as that of your small and medium-sized business customers: in order to offer an effective Exchange service, you have to invest large amounts of capital in the hardware and software, then manage the systems, maintain the equipment and the network and also support end-users.

The total cost over the first year, can easily exceed $100,000, which is both a large risk and also a difficult investment to recoup.

There is now an alternative, however: a number of hosted Exchange providers now offer private or white label partner programs, which allow you to sell your customers the latest hosted Exchange services, under your own brand, but without having to invest heavily in infrastructure, software and specialist personnel.

These private label programs offer the same infrastructure that the providers’ own customers use, with clustered servers, SAN storage, guaranteed uptime and all of the latest features of Exchange, badged as your own service.

The suppliers also provide marketing materials, sales coaching and level two support, which is handled by their own in-house support teams with specialist knowledge.

Feb

14

How to succeed as a web host reseller

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Web hosting services are in very high demand and therefore any re-seller who knows what they are doing can make a bundle quickly without too much trouble.However, just like in any other business, one needs to be cautious and to be very much aware of exactly what they are doing.

The first and most important thing you need to do is find a reliable web hosting service. And that host also needs to have a good reseller program. There are not too many around that have this ideal combination but they are there, if you know where to look.

A reliable web host will mean that the clients you sign up will not run into problems and in case they do, the host must be able to provide proper customer service and respond quickly to any technical problems. This is very important because your reseller business will grow much faster if your current customers are able to refer others. Or if you can refer prospective customers to a portfolio of satisfied current clients.

You will be able to earn more with hosts that already have reseller programs as they will already have good packages on offer that you need to pay very little for and yet have high revenue potential with. Some reseller programs are specifically designed so that resellers are able to enter the web hosting business with very low overheads.

These days we have hosting services that have flexible plans. This will enable you to sign on a higher volume of customers and should also give you a more reliable and steady stream of income. In one popular program I know the reseller pays only $ 29.95 per Month for 2 GB space/10 GB Bandwidth. If the reseller has 100 accounts hosted @ $ 6.00/month. He has to bill his customers every month and will get paid a total of $ 600 income ($ 570.95 Profit)

As a reseller you will also need to have a well thought out plan on how you are going to market and promote your own web site. There is no way your reseller program is going to be successful unless you have a system for attracting enough traffic to your web site so that you have a good chance of turning a high percentage of that number into actual paying clients who will pay the web host you are working with, so that you can in turn get your reseller commissions.

It is absolutely important for the reseller control panel at the web host to provide absolute control for you as a reseller to manage and invoice your clients. This is especially useful where you have a monthly payment system. In this case good records are imperative so as to ensure that follow up for payment is made as easy as possible. There are some hosts that even have private label features and offer multi lingual control panel.

Feb

14

Becoming a Web Host Reseller

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You’re the webmaster of more than one website. You design websites for clients. Your business needs more than one site. Is a web host reseller account for you?
What is a web host reseller account?

A web host reseller account is a web hosting account that allows you to create hosting packages to sell to your clients. You can also host multiple sites of your own using the disk space allotted to the one hosting account.

Typical features of web host reseller accounts:

They come with a reseller-level control panel that allows you to create your own packages.
You can allocate disk space and bandwidth to each site on the account and change the space and bandwidth specifications if the site’s needs change.

Most reseller accounts provide the option for private nameservers (also called private label, personalized nameservers, or virtual nameservers). For example, if your reseller account is with SomeName Hosting and your company name is ExampleName Services, your clients will enter ns1.examplename.com and ns2.examplename.com for the nameservers for their domains.

With a web host reseller account, you handle account setup, billing, and (usually) support for your clients. Your web host provider maintains the servers and answers your support questions.

While a few starter reseller hosting packages are as small as 500 MB, most reseller providers offer packages starting at 1 GB or larger. A range of packages is usually available, a few going as high as 30 GB of disk space.

Who should become a web host reseller?

1. Individuals or businesses with more than one website
If you have more than one website and the total disk space you need is 500 MB or more, you can benefit from having a reseller account. The cost for web hosting is lower than if you have individual accounts for each site. Also, you can adjust the disk space and bandwidth allocations for each site.

2. Related service providers
A reseller account is also useful for people who provide related services. If you’re a web designer, for example, why stop at designing sites? Provide your clients with web hosting under your company name, and you continue to earn revenue from your web design clients.

Let’s say that you pay $40 a month for a 3-GB reseller account. If you offer 30 100-MB packages at $7 a month, you could earn up to $170 a month (after subtracting your cost) from that reseller account. Add on additional services such as search engine optimization and website maintenance, and your revenue increases again.

Advantages and disadvantages of having a reseller account

Advantages
*You can have more flexibility with your web hosting accounts.
*You can save money.
*You can earn more revenue at little cost to yourself.
*You can focus on customer support and leave technical support to your web host.
*Your web host, not you, absorbs server maintenance costs.

Disadvantages
*Your service is only as good as your upstream provider. If the server is frequently down, for example, you may lose clients.
*If you ever have to change web hosts, the move will be an inconvenience for your clients as well as for yourself.

Steps to becoming a web host reseller

You’ve decided to get a reseller web hosting account to resell web space. What now? Here’s a step-by-step guide.

1. Choose the platform you want to use.
More open source software programs are available for Linux than for Windows, which makes Linux less expensive. While most programs (Perl, PHP, Flash, etc.) run on both platforms, a few run on only Windows or Linux. A site that requires ASP or MS Access, for example, requires a Windows platform.

2. Choose the control panel you want to use.
Control panels for websites range from very basic to loaded with features. As a reseller, you’ll also have a control panel for you to set up and control hosting accounts.

In Choosing Your Hosting Automation Software, we compare several control panels, all of which offer good features for web host resellers.

3. Choose your web host.
The web host company that you choose for your reseller account is a key decision — your business success depends on the quality of your host. Factors to consider when choosing a web host for a reseller account:

*The platform and control panel
*Account features
*The company’s reputation — search for online reviews by clients
*The record of server uptime
*The level of support — how fast does tech support respond to support requests, especially time-sensitive ones?
*Flexibility — does the web host have packages that allow you to upgrade when your needs increase? Will they customize plans if necessary?
*How long the web host has been in business — while a new web host may be very good, many web hosting businesses fail within the first year
*Price — consider what is included in the price
*Get Started with reseller hosting.

4. Set up your hosting plans and prices

Divide your bandwidth by your disk space to find out the ratio of bandwidth to disk space that you can offer. Take into account any ratios that differ if you upgrade to a larger package, and then base your packages on that ratio.

For pricing, consider what competitors charge, but also factor in any additional services you’ll be offering.

5. Develop a business website
You have three main choices for website development:

Create a website using an existing website template
*Hire a designer or a design company to design your site for you
*If you have web design skills, design your site yourself
*Include all the information that clients will want to know about your services and company.

6. Make your site e-commerce ready
To be able to accept payments for hosting accounts, you’ll to set up:

*An SSL certificate
*A merchant account
*A payment gateway

7. Set up a helpdesk
A helpdesk allows clients to contact you with support requests and you to track and respond to those requests.

8. Set up billing
With an automated billing system, clients are billed and payments are registered with little effort on your part. Most billing software licenses are priced per month or per year, with some billing software companies offering prices for lifetime licenses.

Some popular billing and payment processing systems:
*Modernbill http://www.modernbill.com/
*ClientExec http://www.clientexec.com/
*WHM.Autopilot http://www.whmautopilot.com/
*Whois.Cart http://www.whoiscart.net/

When you choose a billing software program, check if it’s compatible with your server platform and if support is included.

9. Create a welcome email
After you set up hosting accounts for your clients, you’ll need to send them a welcome email. Include in this email:

*A confirmation of the plan details
*The nameserver names
*A username and temporary password
*A link to the control panel
*Links to your knowledge base / FAQ and to your helpdesk

10. Market your website
Submit your site to search engines. Tell your family, friends, and business acquaintances about your website. Include a link to it in your signature line in outgoing emails. But don’t stop there — market your website http://www.marketingcontrolpanel.com via incoming links, advertising, newsletters, and special offers.

Feb

14

How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic?

Filed Under General Issues, Hosting Software, SEO and Strategies, Server Hosting | 1 Comment

Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like
being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don’t
know which direction they are coming from or who they are.
Without analyzing your web site traffic, it’s difficult to
improve your web site marketing.

Know Your Traffic Language
You should be aware of the different terms used to describe
web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site
visitors. Here are the main terms used:

Visit – these are all requests made by a specific user to the
site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set
period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further
accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or
hostnames/ip addresses

Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page.
Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic
files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a
number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a
hit.

Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes
multiple hits to view a page.

Pageview/Impression – this is the number of times a page is
accessed as a whole.

Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour
period.

Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your
referrers will tell you who’s linked to your site. This can be
particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine
traffic is coming from.

User Agent - This refers to the software used to access your
site. Sometimes known as a “browser” or “client”, the term user
agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet
Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can
identify what software is being used to access your site, you’ll
be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search
engines last crawled your pages.

Ways to Track Your Visitors

1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but
appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see
something like “You are visitor number 12345 to this page”.
These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the
ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such
that it adds more than 1 each time.

2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes
through your Website, so they do more than just count your
traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than
just the number of visitors — it can break visitor statistics
down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and
countless other values.

Examples:
Hitbox
Sitemeter
Extreme-DM

Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or
graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service,
which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using
these services unless you don’t have the ability or expertise to
execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.

3. Using Your ISP’s Statistical Package
Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record
every single “hit” (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site.

Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site
visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how
long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before
signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access
to raw log files. Even if you don’t need them immediately,
sooner or later you’ll be glad to have them.

There are also different types of log files - access, referrer,
error, and agent are the primary ones.

Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:

Access log
Analyzing the access log will give you information
about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how
long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in
determining whether or not your site is working as you intend.

The record below shows the visitor’s IP number or hostname, date
and time of the request, the command received from the client,
the status code returned, the size of the document transferred,
and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.

nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] “GET
page.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 23443
“http://www.mydomain.com/page.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)”

Referrer Log
The referrer log contains referral information - the source that
referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine,
you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your
site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record
below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com
to the index page of the site.

http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /

This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search
engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /

Agent Log
This log provides information on which browser and operating
system was used to access your site.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)

Error Log
The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated
by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows
the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification,
explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the
file that caused the error.

apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162]
File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico

As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about
how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how
you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled
into a useable format.

4. Web Traffic Analysis Software
These are programs that analyze your server logs and then create
traffic reports accordingly. The quality of the reports generated will
depend on what software you actually use. Some log analyzers are
free and come preinstalled on many hosting accounts, while others
can cost a good deal of money.

Examples:
Webalizer
WebTrends

Webalizer (free)
The Webalizer is a fast, FREE, web server log file analysis
program which produces usage statistics in HTML format
for viewing with a standard web browser. The results are
presented in both columnar and graphical format, which
facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly
usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to
display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser),
search string, entry/exit page, username and country.

Here’s an example of the Web Usage Statistics:
http://www.webalizer.com/sample/index.html

WebTrends ($495)
The Web Trends Analyzer produces essential reports on
web site visitor patterns, referring sites, visitor paths and
demographics. You can learn, for example, which sites
and keyword searches have referred the largest number of
visitors to your site.

It presents data, detailed and in-depth, in an organized and
concise tabular format with full-color graphs.

This Log Analyzer is priced at $495 and is licensed for a single
web server hosting content with a maximum of 50 domains.

Conclusion
Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your
web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them
telling you:

  • Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used.
  • Who is visiting your Web site.
  • Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for.
  • Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful.
  • Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages.

Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing
strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to
boost your web traffic and sales.