I received an e-mail from a soon to be web host the other day, and they asked:

“How often should I look over my terms of service?”

Most people think a terms or service and acceptable use policy are things that you should put up once and then forget about. We could not be further from the actual truth of things though. Sure you don’t need to review it daily, weekly or even monthly. I would suggest reviewing it once a year though to make sure all your ducks are in a row.

Has your business model changed? Maybe you started offering new plans or features you didn’t in the year before. If so this might be the time to include something about them so nobody will say they were not featured or told about when it comes to these new things you are offering.

Have bad things happened? We often learn from our mistakes - and if any have been made you should update your terms of service to reflect them so they don’t happen again. Maybe you had somebody not aware of the DMCA or you had somebody hosting a kind of script that ate away at your server resources?

Cover all the basics! Here are some of the basic things you should make sure you cover in your terms of service or your acceptable use policy.

• Spammers are not Welcome
• DMCA and Copyright Notices
• No Breaking the Laws
• Terms of Cancellation and Suspension

Last but not least you should make sure you have something in the bottom of the terms of service that says something to the effect of, “We have the right to change this at any time for any reason. As soon as it gets updated, the new policy will be in place. Please check this page often for updates”. This covers your bases for quick changes you need to make.

I got a question from a Web Hosting Show listener last week about how to do a traceroute. Now this might be hosting help 101 for some of us out there, but it never hurts to get a ‘bit of a refresher course.

Here is how you can do a trace route from your PC (Windows XP, Vista):

1. From the Start menu, select “Run…”
2. When the run box comes up, then type in cmd
3. When you get the command prompt, enter tracert yourdomain.com
4. Hit the “enter” key on your keyboard and wait.

For the Apple people in the crowd, you can follow these steps:

1. Double-click the Hard Drive icon > Applications folder > Utilities folder > Network Utility program.
2. Select the trace route tab and enter the domain name
3. Press the “enter” key and wait.

Hope that helps. Doing a traceroute can be very helpful when figuring out if your web site is down or if there is some bottleneck between yourself and the server you are hosted on keeping you from pulling up your web site.

Have a look around, web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute. Have you ever stopped to think what price you are really paying though when it comes to these discount prices? Now I am not looking to paint every low cost web host with a broad fraud brush.

There are some providers out there that have the business plan in place to handle it. They just might be harder to find.

Do You Pay for it in Perks?

Some web hosts will get you in the door with the low prices, and then when it comes to addons or accessories to your shared hosting account they stick you with the true costs of hosting. This can often happen with upgrades for JSP and ASP support and other upgrades some, but not all, will need.

Keep an Eye on How Long Your Signing Up For!

For an example, lets say Dummy Example Web Host is offering you a hosting deal you can not beat. It is $3.50 a month for 500 GB Disk Storage and 5 TB of Bandwidth. Now when you get on the order page you notice that this $3.50 a month price is only good if you sign up for the 10 year hosting plan. To get this, you must pay up-front: $420. Now if you know they are good then you have no worries but if you have no history with the company do you really want to sign up with them for the next decade? Better yet - will they even be around that long?

The one thing you have to remember (and I have said it time and time before) you have to do you homework when it comes to signing up with any web hosting company. Don’t be fooled by the special deal - and find out if they really are the best of the best or just another guy with a server in his basement trying to make a buck.

Do I Blame the Web Hosting Companies? No!

I can not blame the web hosting companies, because they need to compete with the next guy down the street and make money while doing so. Thanks to the fact that we have so much competition out there for the proverbial bottom dollar; almost everybody undercuts and over-provides. The secret of cheap hosting is to find the one that does so the best.

Diving into networking when it is related to web hosting is a little tricker than it might seem. There are a lot of confusing terms and even more confusing explanations of them all. I figured I’d take some of the most often used hosting network terms you might here and try to break them down.

Propagation - It takes 24 to 72 hours for domain name prorogation to take effect. What does that mean? Well this is the time that it takes for the ISPs to update their cached DNS records so that they learn that your new domain (or old changing domain) now points to the new address.

Traceroute - This is a network tool used to determine the route taken from when you type in a domain name till it reaches the web hosting server the web site is hosted on. You can think of this as following the breadcrumbs, and watching how your domain gets resolved to the place it is hosted.

Whois - Whois is the protocol that is used when asking a database to find out the owner of a domain name or an IP address on the Internet.

Ping - This is another networking tool tht use used to test if a particular server address is reachable across the Web. A good example of this would be if your house was a domain and I came knocking at your front door. Now where it comes in handy to ping is to find out how long it takes for you to come answer the door.

DNS - This stands for Domain Name System, and it is the system used to translate Internet domain names to IP numbers.

As you can see, once you break these down and explain them - all the pieces start to fit together in your head and make a little more sense. The important thing to remember is to do some homework when it comes to terms you don’t know in hosting so that you are better informed about what your web host is doing or what your hosting clients might want.

What is the best way to manage multiple web sites with only one hosting account? That is the question Diane e-mailed to me a little earlier this week, and there are a few different ways you could get this done. Here is Diane’s dilemma.

I am a web designer and I have a bunch of little web sites. I’d like to have multiple web site hosting, so I can easily get in and work on my collection of little web sites.

Right now, I have each one hosted on its own account, so I have to ftp to one, do my thing, disconnect, ftp to the next one, do my thing, disconnect, etc. Also, I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the hosting for these little web sites because they are just little tiny web sites. Can you give me any advice on getting this type of web hosting? Thanks for help.

Now as I noted before there are several ways you could tackle this problem. Read more »

So you have a few friends or clients that need a web host, your pretty savy with the ins and outs of the web hosting world so why don’t you start up your own hosting company? Now many people might look at that and say that it is overkill - but becoming your own mini web hosting company is not so far fetched.

I Want One, What Is It?

So what is a reseller hosting account? If you want a dictionary definition, I would say a type of web hosting in which a person purchases a plan from the hosting company and then resell this plan to other customers.

Where do you find such hosting accounts? There are a lot of web hosts that offer good ones, you’ll just have to shop around. In many cases you will be given a large chunk of hosting space and bandwidth that you can cut up into smaller peices for all the domains you wish to host. You can think of it kind of like a dedicated server - except it is shared, and not so dedicated.

How Does it Work?

Once you have all your peices cut up - you can then turn around and sell this space to Tom, give this section to Molly and save that section over there for yourself. Each section gets its own control panel and acts like your usual shared hosting plan that you are probably more familiar with.

Now some companies take a different route with reseller web hosting. They will give you access to the master account, then you buy littler plans to stuff into your reseller hosting account as needed. If you need five hosting plans for five clients, you would go to them tell them you want a reseller plan with room for five and they will do the dividing up and setting up for you.

The nice thing about reseller hosting plans is if you actually resell to a large enough audience, the hosting plan can pay for itself. Down the line you might even upgrade that reseller account to a dedicated server where you could do all the same things but have more system resources to work with. Who knows, after that you might end up becoming your own web hosting company after all.

Running a web site, on any topic under the sun, does not have to put you in the red and eat up all of your money. There are several alternative paths you can take when it comes to paying for your web hosting account.

Reseller Hosting

With a reseller web hosting account, you can earn a little extra income on the side reselling a web host’s services to your friends, family and clients. With the money made, you can turn around and pay your own hosting bills so you can get out of the red and back into the green.

Affiliate Account

Many web hosts out there today offer affiliate accounts where you place a link on your web site, a person clicks through it and buys hosting from them, and you get credit for the sale. Might not be the easiest way of making money but with the high payouts some web hosts give you might only need to sell to one or two a month. Read more »