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.

Go Daddy CEO Elephant Debacle

Go Daddy is one of those magical tech company success stories. An accountant and self-taught programmer takes a mundane technical process, domain name registration, and builds a billion dollar business marketing it to mainstream America through Super Bowl ads and frat boy humor. Aggressive pricing, frequent coupon sales and user friendly management tools accelerate Go Daddy’s capture of the Internet domain market until it becomes not just a household word, but perhaps the only registrar that most people can name on a whim. Then the unthinkable happens. Go Daddy jumps the shark, or in this case, shoots the elephant.

This is no metaphor. Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons actually shot an African elephant to death and then triumphed the subsequent butchering of the beast set to music in a self-laudatory online video. Expecting a triumphant round of high-fives and yet more revenue generating publicity for his online juggernaut, Parsons was instead almost instantly vilified and denounced by everyone from animal welfare organizations to those who just felt a bit squeamish watching the same type of elephant they took their kids to see at the zoo being hacked-up into bite size pieces by a cheering mob wearing GoDaddy.com baseball caps.

We’re all familiar with the natural cycle of life where predator and prey engage in a deadly game of survival. But there’s a difference between nature films showing lions culling a herd of wildebeest of their weakest members and watching a pompous rich man’s home movies featuring himself killing the strongest and most genetically valuable bull of a dwindling elephant herd, then yucking it up afterwards.

Nobody begrudges Bob of his stunning success as a self-made Internet entrepreneur nor his right to enjoy the fruits of his labor to the fullest. An awful lot of us would like to follow in Bob’s footsteps in pursuit of the American Dream. But he’s not getting a pass on this one either, despite his protestations that the elephant in question was a threat to native crops and that the butchered meat helped feed a hungry village that day. For the same $20k to $40K+ those big game safaris typically cost, Mr. Parson’s could have outfitted that village with elephant-proof fencing and given them the seed, tools and livestock to make them a self-sufficient community. But that’s not nearly as much fun as blasting off a massive elephant gun nearly point-blank into a towering behemoth. Even at that, it took two shots in the black of night to bring the elephant writhing to the ground in excruciating pain.

It’s not the sport of hunting that’s in question. Even the ignorance of participating in what you believe to be a proper culling of overpopulated wildlife when you are really harming an endangered ecosystem could be forgiven. What pushes this incident over the edge is the smug smart-ass satisfaction of destroying something deeply cared about by others and then exhibiting contempt instead of remorse when called on it.

Social and conventional media alike have been abuzz with the backlash to Parsons’ elephant killing. Major animal rights organizations, such as PETA, have pulled their domain assets from GoDaddy.com and placed them with other registrars. You’d expect that. But an even greater groundswell has arisen within the tens of millions of domain and web hosting account holders that, like myself, were happy to do business with GoDaddy over the last half-dozen years.

This is, perhaps, a last straw. Go Daddy’s advertising is looking less cute and edgy and more crude and vulgar as the novelty of attractive women being portrayed as clueless bimbos contrasts with the image of professional women in the workplace. If men and women of the design/build team behaved like the domain and hosting aficionados of Go Daddy skits, Human Resources would be shrieking about actionable sexual harassment. It’s misogynistic 1960’s humor intruding into today’s egalitarian office.

Perhaps Parsons, too, is a relic of the past. One might argue that his company is exhibiting the creakiness of maturity versus the drive and agility of a lean, mean technology startup. Young companies looking to establish a position fall all over themselves trying to attract and retain customers. That’s how Go Daddy got where it is. But look what their customer portal has become. It’s evolved into a labyrinth of add-ons and up-sells that make it nearly impossible to just buy a domain in a matter of a few minutes like you used to. Now you find yourself endlessly clicking buttons to say, “No, I don’t want a certificate. No, I don’t want 500 names that are similar. No, I don’t want instant hosting. Etc, etc, etc.”

For those reasons, a lot of us long-time GoDaddy customers have been on the edge of moving on. I suppose it’s inertia as much as anything that keeps us renewing and adding to our entrenched and, in some cases, massive accounts. As one who has been heavily involved in elephant rescue, conservation and support the last few years, Mr. Parsons’ wildlife “snuff film” is both a dagger in my heart and the impetus to do what I should have done a year or two ago: Research the market and make the move to a provider that better meets my needs. I’m surprised by how many good ones there are. They’re just not all in your face on TV, so you have to do a little looking.

As a place to start, I’d like to recommend Go Elly - Elephant Friendly Domain Registration and Web Hosting Services. It’s a list of providers who have professed to be animal friendly or ecologically sensitive. The companies are competent, the pricing is competitive, even with Go Daddy, and they will assist you in transferring your domains or moving your hosting account and files. Even if you weren’t looking, it could be worth your while to see what else is out there. You might find yourself paying less or getting more features than you have now.

With Hosting You Get Domains

How much would you like to pay for, say the next 3 months, to host your web sites? How about nothing?

That's right. You'll pay nothing, nil, nada, el-zippo when you take advantage of the summer 2009 promotion being run by 1&1 Web Hosting. In case that's not good enough, they'll throw in domain names for free. Still not good enough? How about business hosting for $9.99 a month? How about developer hosting for $19.99 a month? How about free software to really seal the deal?

Free software? What kind of free software?

It's the software you need to build and promote your website. Even the simplest beginner hosting plan, which goes for a measly $3.99 a month by the way, gives you the online 1&1 WebsiteBuilder. If what you want is a good looking Web site really fast, then you'll be up and running within the hour with your own content.

Upgrade to the family and hobby site plan that runs $4.99 a month and you'll get a CD ROM of specialized software that includes photo editing, GIF animation, site submission and ranking, and FTP for uploading files to the server.

Now, upgrade to the business hosting or developer hosting plans and, in addition to the jaw dropping amount of storage and bandwidth that come with these services, you'll get a premium software suite with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, Adobe GoLive CS2 for website design plus the software included with the family and hobby site plan.

Oh, you thought you had to go out and spend a fortune for those programs so you could design a really professional website? Put your money back in your pocket. You can get your hosting package, domain names, and design software for less than what you were going to spend on software packages.

So, how about those domains? With 1&1 hosting packages you get at least 1 domain included. You don't have to pay registration or renewal fees as long as you keep your hosting. The beginner package comes with 1 domain, which is about all a beginner should be attempting anyway. The home and hobby hosting offers 2 domain names. The business package offers 3 and the developer hosing gives you 5 domains at no charge.

Want more than that? Right now, you can get .com, .net, .org, .info, .us and .biz domains for just $6.99 a year. That's just through August 31, so you best hurry to get in on that bargain rate.

Clearly, 1&1 has deals going that are far superior to run of the mill hosting and domain name registration services. But then, they always do. Get all the details and sign up for your amazingly low cost web hosting packages with free domains while these specials are in effect.

Your Business Website is $7

Business websites are as ubiquitous as, well, businesses. In this connected age, any business without some sort of online presence is really behind the curve. Websites are a definite marketing advantage, but at what price? Custom sites can easily run into the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Even cheesy local sites designed by the owner's kid can cost a hundred bucks or more per year just for hosting. But what if you could get a professional looking site and domain for under $7 a year? Would that sound interesting?

Don't keep blinking. That price is correct. For $6.99 a year, the world's largest Web host will register your domain and give you a 5 page site builder. It's hard to find domains priced that low. But with online site building software and hosting included? Incredible.

Over the weekend, I got an idea for a business recruiting site I wanted to build. Normally, I'd just register a domain and then use the tools I've got to build-out a site on my reseller hosting account. But when I saw the deal that 1&1 Internet was offering, I got second thoughts. First of all, the domain name registration itself was priced $2 less than I could get it at the usual haunts. I didn't know if their Starter WebBuilder feature was any good, but thought it worth a try just in case. If it takes a couple of days to code up a site from scratch, there could be considerable time savings using the builder tool.

I'll let you judge the results for yourself. I bought RiverSuccess.com late Saturday night. Then let the DNS propagation settle out overnight and started working with the Web tool after the Indy race on Sunday. It was ready to be posted less than 5 hours later. Immediately upon publication, this "weekend wonder" was open for business.

This particular domain, called River Success, is being used as a recruiting tool for the Commission River affiliate program. Commission River is something like Commission Junction, except that the emphasis is on telecommunications and related technology programs and they have a strong training program in place to jump-start new affiliates. With unemployment numbers skyrocketing, it seems like a lot more people should be interested in building at least a side income to get some control over their future. The program works best for those who have a serious business interest rather than just a passing curiosity. That's why I chose a serious B2B theme rather than something more lightweight. You do get a choice of templates, images and color themes.

I mentioned that the 1&1 WebsiteBuilder limits you to 5 pages. For many small business applications that's plenty. If it becomes a limitation, they offer an upgrade program for $9.99 a month that gives you unlimited pages. You'll also need the upgrade if you want to install any of your own code. With the basic package you're limited to hyperlinks.

The tool is actually pretty simple to use and if you've done any site building you'll be up to speed in literally a matter of minutes. A nice feature is that you can define titles and meta tags page by page. That makes you findable and unique in the eye of the search engines. Perfect for a business site.

So if you have a small business and haven't wanted to get caught up in the learning curve and expense of creating a related Web site, here's your chance. Seems like this is also good for anyone who just wants to try something online to see if it will work. You can start off with the domain name and free builder. If what you're doing proves promising you can always upgrade to the larger package or build-out a big, big site using Adobe Dreamweaver or other design software and then host it with 1&1 Internet.