I have been researching through various webhosting forums and communities to see if there are any success stories that I could share with you and help you grow your hosting business in the local market. I found few such stories that might just work for you. I will share with you what these companies have been doing and also add few tips of my own. Go ahead, read these tips and see if you can leverage them to grow your hosting business.

1. Mass advertisement does not always work – The very first advertisement medium that comes to anyone’s mind is the local newspaper to reach a very large population of people. This can sometimes be pure waste of money and time. Why? – Simple to say, you are not getting the attention of those who are really interested in hosting. Whom are you reaching – companies or individuals. There’s a lot of difference there. Are you with me? So, what should you do?

If you are targeting companies, find out and prepare a list of companies in your locality and send them a detailed profile of your company and the solutions you offer. This is a good example of highly targeted marketing that works better than advertisement. I prefer targeted marketing over advertisement as you are atleast sure that your profile reaches the IT department of the companies and the chances of someone making a decision will be much higher than just advertising your business in the newspapers. But if you are targeting inviduals, advertising in the local newspapers is the way to go.

2. Use the phone book and local newspaper – Scan through various sections of the phone book and newspapers and spot the listings/entries that do not have a website address mentioned or display a free email address such as gmail.com, yahoo.com or anything else. These are the people and companies that most likely do not have a website at all. They are your potential customers. Tip – In the phone book, focus more on the section that lists non-technical people such as real estate agents, doctors, lawyers etc. Now that you have a list ready, call them and tell them the positive impact of having a website and potential business they could do with their website. Tip – Talk about some free tools such as appointment managers, calendars etc etc. This could be time consuming activity but pays off very well as you are reaching highly targeted and potential customers.

3. Harness the power of PPC advertisement – This is one medium that can quickly bring in thousands of potential customers in almost no time. Although, many webmasters refrain from using PPC as the cost of keywords related to hosting industry is very high, but if you use PPC to show your ads to only those people who are from your city and also only on those websites that are very popular in your area, the cost of PPC could be down dramatically. Google Adwords is what you should get started with.

4. Target local schools and colleges – Offer free hosting accounts for a month or two to students, tell them what can they do with websites and how can they make money from it. You may want to approach local educational institues and talk to the management. Ensure that you offer special pricing, should I say cheap, to students who wants to continue hosting with you. This is where overselling will help you to a great extent.

Ok, I think the tips mentioned above are good enough for you to get started for now. I will make another post with more tips.

Meanwhile, if you have some interesting tips that you want to share with our readers, please post them in the comments sections below and help others grow too.

The purpose of this post is to help you find the host that meets your requirements and also to tell you about the features you should be looking for in the hosting company.

Domain name: We strongly recommend that you stay away from the free domain offers from hosting companies and register a domain name on your own. In future, if you decide to discontinue hosting with a provider, you will not have to worry about transferring your domain name from them to your new hosting company. This will save a lot of your valuable time.

Hosting software: Our choice of software is WordPress that meets the demand of a vast majority of the bloggers. Anyway, most of the open source softwares are built to run on PHP and MySQL combination and should you choose any of those, you should then be looking for a hosting company that supports PHP and MySQL based hosting. The web server is of course Apache and almost every hosting company has servers running it, so no problem with that. Also, look for the availability of mod_rewrite module in Apache for your blog to be able to rewrite fancy/custom URLs for you. That will help you in search engine optimization of your blog.

Website Space: For starters, disk space worth 100MB is just more than enough. For serious bloggers who will write a lot many posts, we recommend that you get at least 500MB on a safer side. The bigger the better but don’t get too much because you may not use all of that anyway.

Bandwidth: One popular post and your bandwidth meter will not stop until your allocated bandwidth is exhausted. If you write great content and your post gets dugg on Digg, expect a lot of traffic. So, get yourself some descent amount of bandwidth, say at least 10GB a month. Keep an eye on your bandwidth consumption and buy more when needed.

Multiple domain hosting: If you intend to launch more than one blog, check for multiple domain name hosting account with the web hosting company. Otherwise, you will end up buying two hosting accounts. Better, choose a reseller account that will let you host multiple domain names on a single account and save a lot of money.

We hope that this post will help people who are starting afresh with blogs. If you have any suggestions or comments, please post them in the comments section below.

Why you should use a forum software for your hosting company?

Well, for many advantages that it has got but only when the forum is functional and your staff pays attention to what users say in the forum.

Communicate – A forum can be very useful to make the announcements about server outages, network upgrades, planned and unplanned outages, security attacks, power outages etc. Use it to the best of your advantage and request your users to check the forums first to find out if there are known issues with network or servers they are on. This saves on a lot of support tickets.

Knowledge Base – Use the forum like a knowledge base. Make sticky posts for new users, create threads that talk about most common issues and resolutions. Analyze your previous tickets and make sticky posts about most commonly reported issues by new users. This will save a lot of time for your staff.

Grow into a Community – Users help other users. When a forum is functional, you will find that end users often help other users on technical issues. This will result in significant increase in productive hours for your staff and that time could be used in doing something else.

I see the forum as a value added service that has more advantages than the disadvantages which I am unable to think of. I recommend that your hosting company should have a forum and your staff pay close attention to it. It adds value after all!
[tags]Web Hosting, Customer Support, Forum Hosting, Internet Forum Software[/tags]

Most of the domain names that registered and hosted have nameserver entries assigned to them by either the domain registrar or the company that is hosting the domain. Almost every company ensures that the primary and secondary nameserver addresses are on two different networks so as to provide redundancy in case the primary goes down. But how effective is this strategy? Let’s look at two hosting scenarios and determine what happens when name servers fails.

This will NOT work even when primary or secondary are available.

A domain is hosted on a server and has two name server entries on two different networks. The server goes down, the domain is no longer reachable. Why? – Because there is a single point of failure. Got it?

This will NOT work when primary name server is down but secondary nameserver is available.

A domain is hosted on two servers in two different networks, primary nameserver points to the server in first network and secondary nameserver points to the second server in a different network. The first server goes down, the domain still points to first server. Your site is not reachable. Why? – Even though you have two nameserver entries on two different network, there is no domain failover service or mechanism used.

So what do you do to ensure that your website is always available?

Employ a DNS failover service that will watch your primary server and when it goes down, the dns failover service will automatically forward incoming traffic to the second server. Yes, the best strategy would be to maintain the exact copy of your website on two different servers in two different networks.

So, don’t leave your site under the assumption that if the primary nameserver will go down, your site will still be reachable. We recommend that you talk to your hosting company and get to know the facts about the availability of your nameservers and website. Goodluck!

I have plans to open a hosting company myself, but that’s another few years away and since I keep browsing various sites for web hosting related information, I thought that sharing this information with you will help you in many ways.

The mentioned below are the best places to advertise, about your hosting company on Internet, that will give you good return on your investments.

1. Web Hosting Forums – People who are technically savvy visit forums that are hosting focussed for reading views and opinions of other customers. They use forums to understand and determine the reputation and reliability of a hosting company from other user’s experience. This is the best place to advertise to attract potential customers. Advertising in hosting forums can be pretty expensive but pays off well in the end.

2. Hosting centric sites and blogs – Websites and blogs that are entirely dedicated to web hosting topic tend to have large reader base. Advertising in such sites ensures that you are targeting only those who are interested in hosting solutions. Another great place to advertise for maximum returns.

3. Hosting Reviews sites – Sites featuring reviews of various hosting companies is a great place to advertise about your solutions. Even if there is a paid review, have it done. It’s a one time investment to get a review done that pays off in long run. Recommend your existing customers to read your company’s review and add their comments to it, this can go a long way in your favor.

4. Hosting Directories – If you have reseller plans that you offer, don’t forget to get your website listed in premium hosting directories. A reseller would often land up in a reputed hosting directory to research companies for solutions and other things that are in offer. If the hosting directory has different sections for hosting, get listed in all of them. It’s a good investment in long run.

5. Sites of your customers – No one can beat this kind of advertisement. Let your customers know that they can earn referral revenue if they choose to put a ‘powered by your company’ text at the bottom of their websites and most of them will do it. What you get in return – incoming links that add to your search engine rankings, your customers promoting your company and more customers at the end.

Do you have more of these? Please post them in the comments section below and help our readers discover more ways of advertising their companies and get more customers. If you need help, please contact me for a free consultation.

They put their own ads on their client’s 404 pages and make money from those. If you are not sure if it’s happening with your site, try this. Open your website URL followed by some random text, say, http://www.supermusicsearch.com/error and check the 404 error page that will show up. If you see that the error page is showing up ads that were not setup by you, it must be your hosting company. Another possible culprit could be the company which developed the site for you, if it was outsourced.

What should you do if your host is monetizing your error pages?

Some steps to handle this situation are:

• Modify the 404 error page yourself and redirect it to the homepage when a 404 situation is encountered.
• Ask your hosting company to provide you with an explanation as to why they are using your pages to make money.
• Modify the 404 page to show other relevant links from your site for the URL that’s searched.

For some bright ideas about customizing your error page, visit this link from SmashingMagazine.com

There are many Internet forum softwares currently available in the market. Most of them runs on PHP and are GPL license based. The underlying factors that are mentioned below will remain the same for any forum software you prefer to use.

• Number of users – A forum can have hundreds of users based on its age and popularity but you should be focusing on number of concurrent users. It simply means to take into account the maximum numbers of users, on an average, who are connected to your site. Your forum could have 1000 users but at any given point of time, only 20-30 users could remain connected to your site.
• Number of searches – Many forum owners either overlook or don’t even know that a single search can consume lot of resources. If a forum has hundreds of posts, a simple text search which runs through all the posts looking for a text phrase can require considerable amount of resources on the servers. Multiple searches at the same time can really slow down any forum. One should try to optimize the search queries or add time delay when a search is performed.
• Number of connections to the database is an another important factor. You could have 300 users browsing your forum but only 30-50 simultaneous database connections could be in use. The more the number of database connections, the higher will be requirement of CPU and Memory.

Those were some of the factors with respect to the forum software. Let’s now look at what should be on your list of requirements when you approach a host.

• Uptime – It’s one crucial factor that you should never overlook. When a forum is new, there could be many potential users coming to your site and frequent downtime could send them away from your forum. Dig down into the uptime record of the hosting provider before you contact them or ask them to provide you with some data on their uptime.
• Resources on Server – A forum, when it’s new, may not have lot of users. So, you can safely start your forum on a shared hosting account. But do not forget to check with the hosting provider for the current utilization of resources on the server your forum may be hosted on. If the server is oversold, chances are bright that your forum site will be slow to access. That’s another reason for visitors to go away from your site.
• Backup of forum – A forum can quickly grow up and have hundreds of posts. A hard disk failure and no back up can result in loss of all those posts. Please insist on reading the backup policy of the hosting company you approach. Carefully read their uptime and backup restore policy. Always have upto date backup of your entire forum to be able to restore your forum as soon as possible.
• Bandwidth – You may not need lot of disk space to host your forum but may need lot of bandwidth for the number of users on your site. Buy a hosting package with adequate bandwidth and also find out before hand the charges of additional bandwidth that you may want to purchase, if needed in furture.

A forum can be hosted on a shared hosting account provided the server has enough resources to handle the surge when you receive lot of traffic for certain duration. If your forum has more than 50-60 concurrent database connections and more than 500 simultaneous users, prefer to host it on a VPS (Virtual Private Server). And when your forum becomes massive, only then look for hosting it on a dedicated server.

I hope this post will be of some use to you in handling the hosting requirements of your forum. Please post your feedback in the comments section below.

No-IP DUC is one of such services that offers a free DNS update client which will update your IP address to a host name under no-ip.com, example – yourname.no-ip.com. You can also choose from other 20 such domain names under which you can create a sub-domain that will point to your dynamic IP address. This basic service comes free of cost for personal use and users with higher traffic and requiring more features should consider No-IP Enhanced or No-IP Plus Managed DNS.

The enhanced services cost under $10USD per annum/per account which is a great price considering the features that come along with enhanced/managed DNS services. You can create up-to 20 sub-domains, more parent domains to choose from, multiple MX records, multiple accounts per user and ad free port 80 redirects. This is ideal for users who want to run commercial services using this solution.

» Visit No-IP DUC for more information.

» Source [Netcraft]

Here are some of the most common hosting resources promised by various hosting companies along with a hosting account.

1. Unlimited Bandwidth
2. Unlimited Web Space
3. Unlimited number of email accounts
4. Unlimited number of domains

Most of us end up signing up with a hosting company just because they are offering unlimited bandwidth while in reality we don’t need it. You should know that on an average most websites having very high visitor traffic require anywhere between 30-100GB of monthly traffic and paying lot of money for a hosting account that offers unlimited bandwidth may not really make any sense in reality. But how is that a hosting company can offer unlimited resources? Let’s quickly run through some points for our understanding:

• Averaged Utilization – Hosting companies often have dedicated servers hosted in data centers with a direct 10Mbps (Mega Bits) LAN connection attached to it. Theoretically, 10 Mega Bits per second of data transfer, if you really consume that much, would actually be 108000 Mega Bytes (MB) [~105GB] a day. So, if you are looking for more bandwidth throughput than that, it may not be possible at all. Since most of us will not consume that kind of bandwidth in a single day, hosting companies can average out the bandwidth utilization and share it with other servers and clients as well. So, you still have your unlimited bandwidth offer but which is not utilized entirely.
• Oversold Web Space – It’s one of the important factors that helps hosting companies make money and stay in profits. How? – Say a server has 250GB of available free disk space and hosting company is selling 5GB of web space with each account. That makes 50 such accounts each with 5GB of web space limit. Even if all 50 accounts were to be sold, every hosting account may not use the whole 5GB of given space. Isn’t it? That’s when overselling comes into picture. Let’s assume that each hosting account on an average is using 2GB of space, that leaves us with 150GB [250GB - (2GB x 50 accounts)] of free space on hard disk. Now we can offer another 30 hosting accounts each with 5GB of space. You can oversell it further till you reach the physical storage capacity and that’s how unlimited storage is also offered.
• Hidden Terms & Conditions – If you were to pay attention to the policies of a hosting company offering unlimited resources, you will be surprised to notice many terms and conditions under which you are offered an unlimited hosting account. Some of these terms & conditions are – You may not upload pictures, multimedia files, compressed files but use the space to only upload site related static HTML pages and associated graphics. For example, if your site has 50,000 pages, each of size 100KB, it would require ~4.8GB of space to store those many pages. Now consider the point above about oversold web space, you will understand what we are talking about here.

Some points to consider before you sign up for an unlimited hosting account

• Make sure you read the Terms & Conditions and User Acceptance policy of the provider, if any.
• When in doubt, contact the hosting provider’s support and clarify the space usage constraints.
• Tell them in advance about your heavy usage of space and bandwidth to avoid any conflicts in future.

Suggestions? Something to share with our readers? Comments? Please post your comments below.