Scalable Cloud Servers Free Trial

You’ve been thinking about moving away from in-house physical servers to cloud servers. It’s the amount of grief involved in making the move and the potential cost that has you spooked. You don’t really need a supercomputer to run your business. You’d just like to have the advantages of elasticity and pay as you go pricing. Is that a reasonable thing to ask?

You bet it is! Before you get into a contract with one of the larger cloud services companies, have a look at scalable cloud servers perfect for small and medium business applications, as well as larger corporations. This particular service offers per second billing, the ability to pay only for what you use, free setup, no contract commitments and... there’s a free trial available.

Talk about low risk. Here’s your opportunity to get into cloud computing without a lot of fuss and bother and without committing to something that you’re not sure will work for you. There’s no big learning curve involved, either. These Windows and Linux cloud servers work like physical servers you are already familiar with. Have you spent years running your servers using cPanel and WHM? You can still manage them using CPanel/WHM. You’ll be able to turn up cPanel/WHM-ready cloud servers in a matter of seconds. That’s a lot faster than you could install the software if you were sitting right next to a server in your facility.

What sort of features are available with these scalable cloud servers? You’ll get full root/administrative access and the ability to build, test and deploy servers instantly. Your data is backed up nightly. This is not an oversold service, like some VPS (Virtual Private Servers). You get guaranteed CPU cycles and can burst higher when more cycles are available. If you wish to control your cloud servers programmatically, you can use the RESTful API that is available to control cloud servers.

The company that offers these cloud servers, Atlantic.Net, operates state of the art SSAE 16 (SOC 1) Type II (formerly SAS 70) certified data centers. They are secure, fireproof and climate controlled with multiple direct connections to the Internet. Backup power ensures that your servers will always be running. This is no idle claim. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a 100% Uptime SLA that includes 100% network uptime, 100% hardware replacement and 100% infrastructure uptime, all with money back guarantees. The cloud itself is designed for high throughput and low latency, running at 40 Gigabits per second. There are multiple nationwide data centers located in New York, Chicago, Orlando, Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

You are probably wondering about pricing. It starts at 1.3 cents per hour or $9.49 a month for the smallest server with 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disk, a 2.4 GHz Xeon processor and a 10 Mbps network connection. It goes up from there, of course. The largest server has 16 GB of RAM, 4 x 2.4 GHz Xeon processors 750 GB of disk storage and a 70 Mbps network connection.

Cloud servers offer the benefits of owning your own server without the commitment of buying the hardware, maintaining it, paying for power and environmental controls, upgrading software and then going out to buy more when you run out of capacity. You know that can take days or weeks instead of the seconds it takes to turn up another cloud server.

Are you at least curious if cloud services are a better approach than the legacy techniques of operating in-house physical servers? Get a free trial of scalable cloud servers and give it a try before you make a final decision. Remember, even after you order one or more cloud servers, you can shut them down at any time and pay only for what you’ve used to date. It’s like having a massive data center all to yourself without having to pay for the infrastructure.

Why Have Reseller Hosting When You Don’t Resell Anything?

Many web hosting companies offer a variety of plans from basic shared hosting right on up to dedicated servers and even cloud computing services. One plan you may have noticed is something called “reseller hosting.” Just what is reseller hosting and what is it that you need to resell to use it?

It may interest you to know that there are a lot of website owners that have reseller hosting plans and never resell anything. Why? Because reseller accounts make it easier to manage our many websites. I’ll explain why that is in a moment.

First, let’s have a look at the hosting world and why the plans are set up the way they are. I’ll use HostGator plans as an example, since I’m a current customer and affiliate of theirs.

Entry level web hosting is designed to be easily affordable by anyone who wants to set up their own website or run a blog, such as WordPress, on their own domain. Small businesses are big users of these accounts because they don’t have the traffic or sophisticated web designs that demand high performance dedicated hosting servers. A small store, an independent computer tech, an insurance sales person and a restaurant can all make good use of basic web hosting.

What makes these plans attractive is that they are really inexpensive. HostGator’s “Hatchling” plan starts at $3.96 a month. It’s designed for a single domain, which is all most businesses ever need. You might think that a plan this cheap would be really limiting. In fact, you get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. You also get a shared SSL certificate for secure transactions.

Note the term shared. The way they can offer this at such a low price is that this is shared hosting. By that I mean that you are on a server with a lot of other clients. It’s true that the server has limitations and the hosting company is offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth. It works out anyway because most small businesses don’t need more than a tiny amount of storage, processing or bandwidth. They just don’t like the idea of buying a constrained plan.

In a way, this operates something like cloud hosting in that you are sharing resources with many other users but have the perception that you have all the resources to yourself. You never really bump into other clients because your files are segregated and the server handles resource allocation automatically. If someone does start hogging the server beyond normal expectations, they’ll be asked to move on up to a private server so they don’t bog everybody else down.

The way you control your web hosting service is through a browser-based control panel. The most popular one is called cPanel. Once you get oriented to it, it’s very easy to use. You can set up your email accounts, upload and download files, install preloaded applications such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, view website statistics and error logs, and pretty much anything else you need to do.

Now, here’s where reseller hosting comes in. Say you have more than one domain. Do you need to buy a separate hosting plan for each domain? No, you can move up to the “Baby” hosting plan that lets you host unlimited domains on one account. This works, but you only have one control panel to run everything. It sure would be nice to have a separate cPanel for each domain.

That’s what reseller hosting gives you. You get another manager called WHM or Web Host Manager. This is like a super cPanel. It lets you create separate hosting accounts for each domain. That takes a matter of minutes when you get on the procedure. From then on, you can use the cPanel that is dedicated to a particular domain.

It’s called a reseller account because it is intended for web designers or companies that want to offer web hosting services themselves. Some designers have found they can make a tidy income by designing “brochure” sites for small businesses in their town that have no idea how to do it themselves. You charge so much for the site design and then so much a month to host it and update the files as needed. In some cases, you may want to let the client modify their own files. That’s why you need a separate cPanel for each account. It keeps one client from wreaking havoc on another client’s files.

As someone who owns and operates a couple of dozen small commercial websites of my own, I’ve found that it works best to treat them as separate entities with their own hosting accounts. The reseller account lets me have a separate cPanel for each domain while keeping the cost within reason. You can have as many domains and accounts on one reseller account as you like. The limitations are disk space and bandwidth. HostGator’s “Aluminum” account gives you 50 GB storage and 500 GB bandwidth. This is plenty for dozens of small sites. If you need more, then just upgrade for more resources. If you need more than 200 GB storage and 1,400 GB bandwidth, it’s time to move on up to a virtual private server or dedicated server.

So, which type of hosting works best for your business? Is the basic hosting package all you really need for now or do you want the kind of control you have with a reseller account? Learn more about all the hosting packages available from HostGator and choose what works best in your case.

Website Reseller Hosting For One

Most people think of a website reseller hosting account as an easy way to get into the hosting business with a private branded turnkey operation. The other obvious use for reseller hosting is for the web designer who builds many small sites for local businesses and maintains them for a fee. But there is yet another important application for a reseller account. It’s highly flexible hosting that you use all yourself.

What sense does this make? The more domains you have, the more sense it makes. Back in the early days of the Internet, domain names were expensive and most businesses were happy just to have one domain for their online endeavors. But over the last decade or so, domains have gotten cheap enough to build a collection. You may want a separate domain name for each of your product lines, each division of a business, or each outreach program of a charity.

The next step is how to put all those names to work. In some cases, it is appropriate to build one site and point each domain at a different page or section of the website. In other cases, you really want different sites with different designs. Each domain supports a single site. Unfortunately, each site needs its own hosting.

Some companies buy their own servers and set them up to host their domains. Fewer small, medium and even large companies do that anymore. Like domains, hosting has become inexpensive enough that it makes more sense to buy the service rather than trying to run it yourself.

Here’s where economics comes in. You can give each domain its own hosting account at anywhere from $4 to $10 per month typically. If you only buy a few domains over the years and just buy them when you want to start up a new business, this is probably the low cost way to go. If most of your activity is online rather that bricks and mortar, you may have a collection of domains that numbers from a half-dozen to hundreds. Many online entrepreneurs and large organizations easily have 50 or 100 domains.

You can see how the cost of hosting dozens of domains can run into the hundreds of dollars per month with individual hosting plans. What many companies do that this point is move up to business hosting plans that let you host multiple domains on one service. The way this works is that each site you build has its own folder in your account. The hosting company sets up its servers to know which folder to grab files from for a particular domain name.

Does this approach work? Yes and no. You still have only one account, so you have a single .htaccess file that works across all sites. It’s possible that you can do something to tweak one site that will affect another. If your sites are all pretty similar and simple in design, loading a few domains on one hosting plan may work fine. I’ve done this over the years with good results. Even so, there is something even better that gives you the flexibility of having multiple hosting services but at a price more like one.

That something is website reseller hosting. The beauty of a reseller account is that it is already configured to keep your individual sites separate. You wouldn’t want a hosting customer or retail client of yours to be able to do anything that would affect another customer’s site, would you? Of course not. With reseller hosting, what you do with one of your sites will have no effect on the others.

The way this works is that you have two control panels. Many companies selling reseller accounts running on Linux servers are using WHM (Web Host Manager) and cPanel. The WHM panel is designed for you as the administrator of the site. It allows you to create and modify the hosting for each domain. You can allocate each site the amount of storage and bandwidth it needs. WHM is the master control panel to monitor and control all sites.

cPanel, the control panel, is intended for the webmaster of the individual site. Each site gets it own separate cPanel. You can log-into the cPanel with its unique username and password so that you can work on a particular site. If you are hosting for clients who want to maintain their own site, you give them the username and password for their control panel. You can always get to any site at any time through either the cPanel or the Web Host Manager.

What does the cPanel do for you? It lets you set up forwarding email addresses or POP mail accounts for a site, FTP files to the server instead of using a separate FTP client, access the server logs for that site, password protect directories, deny access from particular IP addresses who are bothering you or trying to hack your site, set up and administer MySQL databases, install server hosted software, and set specific server handlers for that particular domain.

I’ve been using HostGator Website Reseller Hosting for a couple of years now with excellent results. I’m running a couple of dozen domains, each for a separate site, on their smallest reseller account with plenty of capacity to spare. What’s considered small today compared to a half dozen years ago is really quite impressive. For $24.95 a month, you get 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of monthly bandwidth to share among your sites. I’d suggest setting up a variety of hosting “packages” of various size storage and bandwidth in your WHM. Then you can assign the little sites small packages and save the big packages for your larger or more popular sites. You’ll be able to monitor and adjust bandwidth and disk usage for all sites from your WHM.

One peace of mind I really like about a reseller account is that you can set up a new site on a whim whenever you want. Just buy a domain name from HostGator or other favorite registrar and by the time you’ve got your account set up and your first pages created, you’ll be ready to go live online. It can be 3 AM when the muse strikes. With your reseller hosting you can add new accounts yourself in a matter of minutes any hour of the day or night. The best part is that the incremental cost of adding another site is only the cost of the domain. There’s no extra cost for adding another site to your reseller hosting.

Does this sound like the kind of flexibility you need in running your online operations? If so, check out the various low cost hosting packages, especially Website Reseller Hosting, that you’ll find at HostGator.

The Easy Way To Host Lots Of Domains

With more and more businesses moving online, companies are finding that one domain name is no longer adequate. You may very well want an individual domain name for each product line you offer. Online marketers will definitely find themselves constructing separate web sites to be fine tuned for each type of product sold or even each demographic group being targeted. The problem then becomes how to host all those domains.

The traditional difficult and expensive hosting solution is to buy a separate hosting service for each domain you register. Even at $5 to $10 per month each, that can get expensive for smaller businesses and independent marketing people. If all you have is a few domain names and that’s all you ever expect to need, then go ahead and add hosting services at the same time you buy your domains. For only a few domains it won't get that pricey and you'll avoid paying for a large hosting account that you’ll never need.

So how can you host a dozen or more domains without breaking the bank? One approach that is often touted for this purpose is to start with a single hosting account and then purchase “add on” domain hosting. Usually for a couple of bucks a month each, the hosting service will program their servers to allow you to have an additional domain on your shared hosting service. The way this works is that a separate folder is created within your public HTML hosting space where you put the files for this extra site. It’s just like any other folder, except that the system knows to direct the visitor to those files for the “add on” domain. As you add more domains, you add more and more folders.

I’ve used this approach and, while it works, you still have only one control panel and one htaccess file to cover all domains. Frankly, I much prefer the flexibility and independence of giving each domain its own cPanel and being able to allocate storage and bandwidth quotas depending on the size and traffic for each site. You’ll really appreciate this if you need to do some experimenting during development of a brand new site and don’t want to risk affecting the operation of your existing sites.

Does this mean you need to stick with individual hosting plans for each domain to decouple them? No, not at all. The solution you want is called reseller hosting. It was intended for Internet development businesses that support many clients and want to give each of them their own separate account. With a reseller account, you can create web sites for many businesses and then let them make their own updates, confident that one customer can’t do anything to damage the site of another customer. You can also use reseller hosting to rebrand the hosting plan so you can sell hosting accounts to your customers.

The name “reseller” pretty much describes a service that is intended to be split into smaller accounts and resold at a profit. You can also keep all of the accounts for yourself and treat each web site you construct as if it were for a separate customer. The difference is that you personally maintain all the sites by logging into a separate control panel for each site. You also get a master control panel called the WHM or Web Host Manager to create, upgrade and delete all those individual sites.

Why would you want to buy something for your own use that is designed to be resold? Simple. The price is right. For instance, You can get a HostGator reseller web hosting account for $24.95 a month. That gives you 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of bandwidth to host unlimited domains.

You read that correctly. You can host all the domains that will fit into your reseller account for $24.95 a month. Let’s say that you want to host 25 sites on your account. You can assign each site 2 GB of storage and 20 GB of monthly bandwidth. The cost spread across all sites comes to $1 per site for hosting. Just where are you going to get professional grade web hosting with free website templates, free site builder software, unlimited MySQL Databases, unlimited sub domains, and unlimited POP 3 email accounts for a buck a month per site?

With the $24.95 per month reseller hosting account, you may find that you can host dozens and dozens of small “mini sites” or affiliate marketing customized sites to support Internet sales. One beauty of this approach is that you can always add another site at a whim when a bright idea occurs. Just buy a domain name, set the name servers for that domain to the ones for your reseller hosting, and create an account for your new domain. In a matter of hours or less you can have a completely new site up and running, even in the middle the night. I know, I’ve done it many times to capture a new business opportunity that suddenly emerged.

By the way, you are not limited to 50GB disk & 500 GB bandwidth. If you need more, order a larger reseller account up to 200 GB disk & 1400 GB bandwidth for $99.95 per month. Beyond that, you may ready to move up to virtual private hosting or a completely dedicated server. All of these are available and fully explained at HostGator.

Note: Photo of server rack courtesy of William Viker on Wikimedia Commons.