Hosting Websites

Hosting Websites was Originally Posted on September 13, 2006 by lavarock

When you host a website, you have a few options.

You can put your site up on a free service and put up with popups.

You can host your own server and put up with problems. You are responsible for installing all of the software, all of the webpages and keeping everything running. Many people host their own sites this way and sometimes host other sites (for free or for profit). This server may be in your own home or in a secure data center.

You can rent space on an existing server. The company hosting the server updates the software and generally keeps things running.

This last option is what many of us do with our websites.

As you may know, I manage a number of websites for my neighbors. I found a web hosting company who had the space, bandwidth and IP addresses we needed to host our sites. I loaded shopping carts and configured lots of sites. In case of problems, I usually find problems and work with the hosting company behind the scenes; often without my customers being involved or bothered by the problems. I also have been doing this for free.

Recently the hosting company has had problems with email not working and for some reason, rather than fix the program (sendmail is a common program), they decided that 3 of my accounts needed to be moved to other servers to solve the problem. Perhaps they were going to retire the server and didn’t want to spend any time on it, or perhaps there are other issues. In any event, what should have taken a few hours, the moving of the accounts has taken days. That plus the finding of the problem has just drug on and on.

Over the past year or so, this hosting company has continued to have more problems then I think they should have. I used to manage servers larger than these and I don’t remember anything like this. I’ve performed and worked with front and backline support and cannot imagine having customers wait this long to fix problems.

My solution has been to find a new hosting company. In order to be able to tailor a server hosting package specifically for my customers, I became a reseller of service. When I had to open a ticket with the new helpdesk to ask a setup question, I had a reply in 6 minutes fom 1st line support. The problem was investigated and sent to the Admins who solved my problem in 20 minutes or so. Their response was quick and I was happy. So far, so good!

So now, although my own customers can call me with support questions for problems with the shopping cart, they also can call a toll free number (or open an online ticket) and problems like the email being broken, will be addressed by the helpdesk (hopefully as fast as my 1st ticket was).

As a reseller, I actually make a couple dollars a year per account, so I don’t have to bill my customers (and neighbors). They are actully still paying less through this arrangement than they did with the last hosting company.

I’ll let you know how things progress.

If you are in need of a hosting package, my “Plate Lunch” offering is a pretty good deal for someone who does not need a static IP address, and my “Luau-1-IP” offering comes with a static IP, just so you can add SSL for things like a shopping cart. Anyway, you are welcome to look around at http://Planet-Aloha.Info and all of the plans come with a 30 day money back guarantee (excluding the purchase of any domain names)!

In case you are wondering, I have loaded a brand new shopping cart for my customer, grabbed the IP address and set up the SSL certificate and am ready to enable their website at the new hosting company, and over at the old site, they are still copying the data… What’s up with THAT?

Mark – the Happy camper