How fast is your hosting support? Well Peer 1 has recently brought that challenge to a whole new level. They recently sponsored two of their system administrators in the 24 Hour LeMons race.
For more information on the race, and to check out some gallery pictures, check out this link: The 24 Hours Of LeMons South 2008 Uber Gallery
I am not the one to tell you how to turn your basement into a datacenter. In my opinion, that is the last thing you really want to do. Sure it sounds like a fun geeky projects, and yes - maybe somewhere down the line you might be cutting a few percentages off your overall costs.
Is it all worth it though?
Services You Can’t Provide with Home Hosting
Looking at the services that a datacenter could provide that you may have trouble with, some of the most important aspects of hosting may be missing from your host it from home server. People like having redundancy. Are you going to be able to provide backup generator power, diesel generators, redundant routing and multiple carriers?
More Work for YOU! (and explosive diarrhea)
Now not only are you managing your own hosting company, you are also in charge of keeping that machine updated, secure and running around the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year. Think of it as having to baby sit a child that you can’t take anywhere because it has unpredictable explosive diarrhea. You never know when it might strike, and as far as taking care of a server goes - you never know when the worst might happen.
Professionalism: Who Would You Rather Do Business With?
The last point I would like to bring up is that people don’t feel comfortable with it, so don’t expect to get many customers to sign onto the deal. If company A told me they were hosting out of their basement and company B told me they hosted out of a real datacenter. I’m going with company B, and you know you would too.
The moral of the story is that people often greatly under estimate the time, devotion, costs and more that it takes to get this type or project up and going. Between server security, updating the server, and administering it too your not going to have much time for anything else. Best to go out and find a good data center or dedicated hosting partner to help you with that side of the web hosting business.
Ever wonder how a web hosting data center is put together? Sure, with love and care - but what else? Here is an interesting video that goes through the step by step process of building a server farm (very quickly!).
Have any other interesting hosting videos to share? Sent ‘em to me at mitch@mitchkeeler.com and I’ll share them with the web hosting world.
From web site launches to why you shouldn’t backup your PC to your digital hosting home. This podcast has been in production for two weeks thanks to a slew of interruptions but I am happy to say finally the Web Hosting Show is back on the air.
Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 154!
Running Time: 16 minutes | File Size: 7.17 MB
Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.
Podcast Exclusive - Part 2 of Our “How to Purchase a Web Hosting Business” Series with Web Strategist Errett Cord. Download the podcast to check it out!
Ever have one of those periods of time where it seems like nothing is going right? Two weeks ago my main podcasting powerhouse of a machine was fried and I was still waiting to get it back from HP. Last weekend, I had no power due to a line of wicked weather. This week I am knocking on wood and tossing spill salt over my shoulder because thus far, nothing has interupted me.
Without monitoring, nobody would know what is happening with the web server you are on. Is PHP running? Does MySQL need to be restarted? You would be without direction just in case a bad situation popped its ugly head. As you can see server monitoring might be the most important part of the hosting business.
Now with shared hosting, monitoring is a given. Most people have no clue what is going on. They just know their Joomla install isn’t working and they want it fixed. With dedicated hosting though monitoring becomes more important because the web host you go with may or may not “hold you hand” in this regard.
The basic things you need to keep your eyes peeled on are HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3. Then you have other services that are second tier to that and you go down the line service by service.
There are services out there that will monitor for you. SiteUptime.com is one service that comes to mind. Another one that I would highly recommend would be Wormly.com. If you remember I had an interview about Wormly with its founder back on podcast 105. Shared, VPS or Dedicated, if you are not sure how, when, where and why your own web host does server monitoring you might want to ask.
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.
