Hosting Advice

If you’ve been discouraged by how competitive the web hosting industry has become, I urge you to reconsider. Sure there are probably thousands if not hundreds of thousands of web hosting companies, with new ones popping up every day, but fear not! The Web Hosting market is so massive, there’s plenty of room for you to grab your own piece of the pie. Just about everyone has their own website these days and they all need a place to host it, so you can be the one to provide this valuable service and claim your share of this highly lucrative market.

Just about every aspect of your web hosting business can take advantage of automation. With the wide variety of hosting control panels on the market these days - Plesk, Ensim and CPanel to name a few, hosting customers can create their own email and ftp accounts, check their stats, install software and even back up their own files, all without intervention or assistance from their hosting company. Usually these control panels have a multi-tiered system, with the top tier at the server level provided to the hosting company. Below that would be a reseller level tier, where your resellers can manage multiple domains for their customers. Finally there will be a control panel provided to each end-user, so that they can add their own email accounts, check stats etc. without requiring assistance from the host or reseller.

Usually things are set up so that the reseller provides technical support to their own customers, although there are some hosting companies that provide end-user support as well, which allows the reseller even more time to just concentrate on marketing and growing his customer base. Having some kind of automated control panel for end-users is absolutely essential, since not only does it save you time and money, but it empowers your customers to complete many important everyday hosting tasks, without having to wait for assistance from their host.

One of the most challenging tasks for any new host will be to provide technical support to their clients. If you don’t have a basic understanding of server administration and DNS, you may be best served by hiring someone who does. You can find companies to whom you can outsource your technical support needs as well. Generally these types of services use some kind of automated web -based ticketing system to answer customer queries. These web based ticketing systems like Kayako E-Support usually allow both outsourced and in-house support techs to work together while remaining transparent to the customer.

Last but not least is the billing and provisioning part of the hosting business. Software such as Modernbill and WHMCS, designed specifically for the hosting industry, can be used to automate this end of things as well. Systems like these will integrate with your server and control panel, along with your domain registrar and online payment processor (Authorizenet, Paypal) to provide a completely automated customer billing and web hosting account provisioning system. In a set up like this, a client can view your website. compare your hosting packages, choose the one he wants, register a new domain name, fill out the contact and payment info and complete the sign up process.

Then an invoice is sent by the system and is emailed to the customer. The transaction is sent to the online payment processor, sometimes detouring through a 3rd party fraud check on the way. If the transaction is approved, the order will usually go into some kind of pending queue waiting for administrator approval. Once the administrator (you) approves the order with a click of the mouse, the domain registration gets sent to the registrar, the account gets provisioned on the server, based on the specs and quotas in the package ordered and finally the customer receives an email invoice marked paid, along with a welcome email containing the login and password for the account.

So ultimately you have a complete end to end automated web hosting system even at the reseller level that leaves you free to market and grow your business and to support your customers without having to worry about the repetitive tasks of provisioning accounts, setting up email accounts, billing etc. If you’re truly looking to get into the web hosting arena with the hopes of growing your business, then look for a host who can provide you with these kinds of automated services, so you can concentrate on your customers needs and marketing and growing your customer base.