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by Eric Lester

Thinking of being part of the growing website hosting industry? There are a variety of entry-level reseller solutions that offer different benefits to different types of user. Two common ones are briefly discussed here.

The website hosting industry continues to grow, despite the well-known “dot com bust” at the turn of the century. Though there is far less venture capital flowing into the hosting market, the demand for websites has not abated. As internet access spreads the number of potential website owners grows. Offering website hosting allows entrepreneurs the ability to tap into this market. A quick search will reveal thousands of potential website hosting companies, and it’s a sure bet most these companies, are, in fact, resellers of another company’s hosting services. To one degree or another, most hosting companies are resellers at some level. Even large companies may be leasing their datacenter space or servers from a separate provider. This article will examine 2 types of entry-level reseller plans, which will be designated “fixed” and “flexible”. Each type has benefits according to the kind of reselling in which a potential customer wishes to engage.

Fixed Reseller Plans
Fixed reseller plans provide a single, discrete selection of “products” for the reseller to offer. The reseller is given access to a set of plans with predetermined resources, such as disk space and monthly transfer, and features. Instead of receiving a single “chunk” of disk space to divide as they choose, fixed plans are sold “a la carte” to the reseller and have their own discrete resources. These plans are provided to the reseller at a steep discount. The reseller marks up the price for sale to their customers. Responsibility for technical support falls directly on the reseller, and is generally the reason the original hosting service provides the discount. This is an important consideration for prospective resellers.

When plans are resold, the customers essentially belong to the reseller and become their responsibility. A reseller’s customers will be calling them for technical support, not the originating hosting company. Resellers should be able to contact the hosting company’s technical support directly if need be. Resellers should be sure their hosting company provides detailed support materials on their website that will allow them to answer most general questions and provide basic troubleshooting if the need arises. The reseller’s provider should have some form of 24/7 live support available if the online support materials are not enough to solve a customer’s problems.

Fixed reseller plans are ideal for resellers who are new to the business or just starting out and do not have a great deal of customers lined up. They are generally easier to administer and troubleshoot, as the plans are maintained by the parent hosting company, not the reseller. Fixed reseller systems should provide more automation in billing and upgrading as well. The downside to fixed plans is primarily economical. As business grows, profits will always remain a percentage of the fee charged by the reseller’s host. There is also a danger the reseller host will be slow in updating plans and prices to move with the current market. Without the ability to custom tailor plans, a reseller is at the mercy of their host.

Flexible Reseller Plans
Flexible reseller plans allow resellers to create and price their own plans. Their resources are made available from a single, large pool out of which each plan they add will deduct space and transfer. For instance, a flexible reseller plan may provide a total of 50 Gb of disk space, and each customer a reseller adds deducts from that 50 Gb total. The disk allotment can be in the form of a virtual private sever partition, or even an entire dedicated server. Flexible reseller plans give the reseller ultimate control over how their plans are created in terms of disk space, transfer and price. This allows the reseller the opportunity to maximize profits as their company grows. One key similarity between fixed and flexible plans is the reseller’s Responsibility for technical support. Resellers looking for a flexible plan should keep in mind the advice about tech support provided above.

Flexible plans are more suited to larger resellers with more technical expertise. The trade off in terms of profit will be felt in the complexity of the management systems running flexible plans. Instead of simply choosing a pre-set plan and adding it, the reseller will be responsible for setting up their own plans, providing a billing solution, and creating an ordering system for their customers. The primary question a potential reseller must ask is whether the trade-off in automation is worth the potential increase in profits. Sever management software is generally not simple and intuitive and many flexible solutions require the reseller become proficient with it before they can add customers. Those willing to put in the time and effort have the opportunity to reap much larger rewards.

Conclusions
Fixed and flexible reseller plans suit different needs. Simple and straightforward, the fixed reseller plan appeals to the entry level reseller without a great deal of clients. Flexible reseller plans are best suited to tech savvy resellers who can understand complex server management software. Both types usually require the reseller provide their clients’ technical support. Choose reseller providers who offer strong online support materials and 24/7 live support. Such materials and services will help the reseller better serve their own customers. Happy customers are long term, profitable customers.

About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting articles.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as “support” materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the “About the Author” section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

by Eric Lester

Website owners face a unique challenge. Making an email address public to communicate with your visitors also makes that address a magnet for spam. Learn how to minimize your risk and still provide that important email contact.

Having a host that provides exceptional Spam blocking services is a must these days. Webmasters and business owners can find their domain email particularly at risk to Spam as their email addresses may be freely available on their websites for both humans, and so-called “spambots” to find. By following a few simple guidelines, you can reduce the stress on your Spam filters by making your email a far harder target to hit. Note that most of these tips are “preventative” in nature. If you read one and know you’ve already exposed your email to that very threat, then you will either need to lose that address or make sure you have a really good filter.

Fooling the Sensors
As a webmaster or the owner of an online store, you want visitors to have a simple avenue of contact. Placing your email address on your site provides this simple avenue, but that avenue is wide, and more than just your customers will journey down it. Having an email address properly formatted and linked from your website makes it the perfect target for spambots. Much like search engine bots that spider the web cataloging information, these bots harvest email addresses for use in mass market email lists. Keeping your email visible to humans but invisible to bots can be accomplished a variety of ways.

• Don’t link your email with a “mailto:” hyperlink
• Spell out your address, for example “sales at yourdomain.com”
• Display your email graphically, but don’t link the graphic
• Advanced users may consider displaying email using Macromedia Flash, as most bots can’t understand links embedded within Flash. This preserves the ability for humans to quickly click your email address and send. This is not to suggest your entire site be in Flash, simply a single email “button.”

Keeping the Secret
This may seem like common sense, but simply minimizing the exposure of your email off your website, as well as on, will aide in stemming the tide of Spam. Your professional email should be used as sparingly as possible. Don’t use it to sign up for personal newsletters or enter into contest forms on other sites. No matter what assurances of privacy a site may provide, the likelihood an address will be Spammed increases each time it’s used. Keep your professional and personal matters highly separated. If you want to get a newsletter, even a professional one, use a home address or consider the use of a free email account. There are a variety of services from large Internet portals like Yahoo and Google. Not only are they free, but they also provide built-in Spam filters, making their use far more preferable for “high risk” situations.

Finally, though it should be completely obvious, don’t respond to unsolicited mass email in any way. Don’t click on their links, reply to the mail, or buy their products. It should be obvious, but the fact is, the reason we all continue to be deluged with unsolicited emails is actually quite simple. They are still profitable to the people sending them. Even if their response rate is in the tenths of a percent, they still make money and thus still send out more. The people who respond are the ones that ensure a Spam filled future for us all.

The Removal Scam
Spam arrives, but, not to fear, there’s a helpful removal link at the bottom. Click, submit, reply, whatever- they come in many flavors, and all of them are potentially deadly. Though a natural response it to use these removal tools, it’s that natural response upon which Spammers prey. Following “removal” instructions may do one of two things. It may remove you from the list, or it may simply be the confirmation a mass emailer needs that the address asking to be removed is, in fact, a real live email account. Instead of stopping unwanted emails, the email account will only receive more, since it has become more valuable than before. It’s more valuable because there’s a confirmation someone is actively using it. Are all removal links scams? No, they aren’t. Some removal links are legitimate. Determining whether a removal link is completely valid is difficult. Never click removal links from unsolicited mass emails, they are most suspect.

Last Lines of Defense
The final lines of defense are filters. Keeping your professional email as quiet as possible and safe from roaming spambots are the primary preventative measures you can reasonably be expected to take. All that remains are filters, on both a server and local level. For site owners, having a host with strong anti-Spam and virus filters installed on your server is your best line of defense. A wide variety of server side filters are available, such as SpamAssassin and MailBoxCop. This kind of service stops Spam and viruses from ever reaching your inbox. Ideally, like MailBoxCop, the service will provide a web based interface to verify it’s quarantined emails and make sure nothing was “over filtered”.

Less effective and generally redundant in face of server side filters, are filters built into email programs. These filters will generally be simple blacklists or filters built on regular expressions. Some may have may have more advanced Bayesian filers built in that can “learn” from being fed a selection of Spam email. It’s preferable such a filter reside on the server and process a large amount of emails in order to be most effective. MailBoxCop functions beyond the server level, intercepting Spam and virus filters before they reach their intended destination’s network.

Conclusions
Keeping your business email as confidential as possible is the best preventative measure against Spam. If you need to have contact email on your site, ensure that it is not directly linked or formatted in such a way as to make it an easy target for spambots. The ideal solution is a simple button in Flash that humans may use like any other button but that is unreadable from a bot’s perspective. Beyond confidentiality, ensure you have strong, robust filters for your site’s email addresses. This is the only option for an address that’s already been picked up by the mass emailers. It’s difficult to completely staunch the flow of Spam, but good filters can put a stop to most of it.

About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting articles.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as “support” materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the “About the Author” section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

by Eric Lester

Are you a website owner that receives a lot of Spam to your domain’s email addresses? This article presents an overview of basic spam-fighting techniques available to website hosting companies. See if yours measures up.

Virtually anyone with an email address knows what Spam is, and has, perhaps, considered giving up the speed, convenience, and simplicity of email because of it. Those who have their own websites are more vulnerable than the average person with a single work or home email address from their company or Internet Service Provider. Email addresses visible on a website can quickly become Spam magnets, as automated programs, similar in form to search engine spiders, roam the web, looking for addresses to which new broadsides of Spam may be fired. Website hosting companies generally provide their clients email accounts for use with their domain, but are you with a host that provides those email accounts with Spam and virus protection?

Local Blacklist Filters
Webmasters shouldn’t need to seek out local filters for their site’s contact email addresses. There are a variety of server level solutions a hosting company can offer to protect their users from unwanted emails. A most basic step is provision of a very rudimentary “blacklist” functionality to their users, allowing them to prevent future Spam emails from arriving from the same address. This type of filter is virtually worthless in today’s Spam environment, though, as it is quite rare to see unsophisticated email arriving from the same address multiple times. Spammers have grown far more sophisticated than that. Blacklisting functionality is only really useful in avoiding email from other real people you don’t particularly wish to hear from anymore.

Keywords and Regular Expressions
More advanced server level Spam filters are available. A small advance is accomplished using keyword filters. Keyword filters merely check for instances of a certain string of characters and deny the message if that string if found. The core problem with keyword-only filters is they can “over filter”. Someone who puts “sex” on their keyword filter will find receiving local news and event announcements difficult if they live in a town named “Essex”. Some filters attempt to address this deficiency by using “regular expressions” in order to build a sophisticated rule set to prevent Spam from reaching your inbox. Briefly, regular expressions are syntax rules used to identify certain strings of text or numbers. These rules can be set up to identify text patterns that are commonly used in Spam. They can become quite complex, but, as with most any filtering method, are not 100% bullet proof. Some filters that use regular expressions come with a basic set that can be appended by the user. Obviously this kind of feature is of little use to someone not familiar with regular expressions.

Bayesian Filters
Currently the most sophisticated filtering methods use Bayesian inferences. Bayesian filters take a large data set and determine the probability a message is Spam based on its similarity to previous Spam messages. The more emails that are processed and flagged theoretically make the filter more accurate. Services that provide filtering on an ISP or host level, like “MailBoxCop”, filter thousands of emails and provide the highest level of success and fewest “false positives”. MailBoxCop is already highly intelligent about identifying Spam and only becomes moreso the more users it filters. The online, browser based interface keeps flagged messages in an easily accessible “quarantine” and allows the user to check for any false positives. White and black list functionality is provided to aide in the prevention of future false positives. A hosting company offering such an advanced service takes Spam and virus filtering for their customers seriously.

About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting articles.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as “support” materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the “About the Author” section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

by Eric Lester

The best deal isn’t always the cheapest. Shopping for the best website hosting can be an easier experience if you think about what kind of resources your website will actually need.

Shopping for website hosting can quickly turn from a careful, measured affair to a frenzied “how low can you go” price hunt. Recent years have seen the concept of a “budget hosting” sphere melt away as many large hosts bring prices down to compete. This does benefit the consumer, as they are more likely to get better service for their dollar. This article will discuss one of perhaps many sets of considerations to make in choosing a website hosting company. To those very serious about their hosting needs, “price” will not be a major factor.

Determine Your Needs
This is the first and most important step. Judging what you need will determine where to look for hosting services and give you a baseline idea of how much you should be willing to pay. This very basic step is where the process will break down if your first instinct is to simply jump online and hunt for the “best bargain”. There are more than enough sites out there that seek to accommodate the bargain hunters. Perhaps your site is suited to a bargain host, perhaps not. Knowing the difference is important.

Start with the 2 core attributes of website hosting, space and transfer. Simply, how large do you expect your site to be and how many people will visit it over a monthly period. If you’re completely new to hosting, you may not be able to accurately gauge either. That’s where you might want to consider actually creating the site, or as much of it as you can, prior to shopping for hosting. Knowing the size of the files you plan to upload will give you a basic idea of the amount of space you need. This will vary wildly depending on the nature of the site. Small, “hobby” sites won’t need a lot of space, sometimes they may not even use 10 or 20 megs of space. Online stores and sites hosting downloads or media files will require much more space.

“Transfer”, or “Traffic”, or sometimes “Bandwidth” on some sites, all generally equates to the amount of information transmitted to the unique individuals who view your site over, usually, a monthly period. Some hosts are moving a daily meter, but most still use a monthly figure. In order to estimate your transfer, a very simple method is to take the total size of your site files in kilobytes or megabytes and multiply by the number of visitors you expect. For a number of reasons, this is not going to be highly accurate, and in many cases will provide a higher number than your traffic in practice will turn out to be. Overestimating traffic is always better than underestimating, since you will always need room to grow with whatever website hosting plan you choose.

What if you have absolutely no idea what size your site will be or how many people will visit? Well, then start small. Though your dreams of domination the web might be strong, you will probably not do so immediately. Popularity and traffic that come with it generally occur over time. Choose a host with a clear upgrade path, and start with a small plan. You can always upgrade as you get a better idea of monthly traffic. Pretty much all webmasters hope their traffic will grow, and a host with a variety of increasingly larger plans is best suited to handle such growth.

Determine Required Features
Though space and transfer are your core attributes, assessing what kind of features you need is also important. This may vary with your familiarity with the web and websites in general. Those who only wish to publish static web pages with content they intend to update personally do not need any kind of exceptionally complex feature set. At its most basic level, the WWW is composed of “HTML” pages, which work on any browser on any kind of computer, be it a “PC”, “Mac”, or run by a different operating system. Novices out there can be assured that HTML pages they create on a PC can be read by someone browsing the web using a Mac.

If your site goes beyond rudimentary HTML, then you will need to pay attention to a host’s feature set. Sites requiring databases and active scripting have to be coded using languages your prospective hosting company’s servers understand. There is a variety of options out there, and it is beyond the scope of this article to go into them, simply be aware of what kind of active scripting you plan to use and make sure your host supports it. Common alternatives are PHP, ASP.net, and ColdFusion. Some of the options will vary depending on the type of server your host uses, most commonly Linux or Windows.

Additional features may also be required. Mailing lists, forum software, and ecommerce software are common features most hosts support. If you plan on setting up an online store, find out what kind of shopping cart, if any, a host provides and be prepared to learn how to use it. Advanced statistics packages like Urchin are also valuable for ecommerce sites. Map out the kind of features you plan to deploy with your site and make sure your choice in host makes them easily available to you.

Support Options
This final component is important, because it is usually the dividing line between quality hosting and less reputable options. One of the first causalities of cut-rate hosting is support. Poor support means that low cost you pay each month isn’t worth much because your site is rarely up. Always check your prospective web host’s site support options. Ideally, they will have phone hours where you can call up and speak directly to first level support. Another “direct contact” option that is popular these days is “chat.” This still allows direct contact with a live person, only through a chat window on your home computer. Ideally a combination of both is one sign a host has invested some money in support.

Bare minimum support options should always include a “help desk” or support ticketing system. This allows customers to send information about their issue and have that issue, and all the responses to it, tracked in a central location, so your support history is always available. Beware any host that only offers an untracked “email” support. Having all 3, phone, chat, and helpdesk, is a reasonably good sign a host pays attention to customer support. You can always “test” these systems prior to signing up by calling or chatting, but, in the interest of a host’s current customers, please keep any conversation brief, as the intent of a support staff is not, directly, to answer sales questions. Your test, however brief, has delayed the technician from handling a request from an existing customer.

Conclusions
Choosing a host is not something to enter into lightly. We’ve reviewed 3 key concepts that should be addressed when looking for a web host. “Price” was not one of them, and, though certainly important for a number of reasons, should never be the final deciding factor. If your website is important to you, or mission critical to your business, you want to find a host with an excellent reputation and high-uptime. Cut-rate or budget hosts rarely obtain either one of these things. Today, even highly reputable hosts will have “budget offerings” that can provide stable hosting at reasonable rates. Do your homework and don’t rush to the first “unbelievable deal” you come across. You’ll be happier with your service in the long run.

About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting articles.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as “support” materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the “About the Author” section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

by Eric Lester

Hosting a website is not as easy a task as it may first appear. A little foreknowledge can help both when shopping for a new site, and when administering it once the purchase is made. This articles covers some online resources that will provide good basic information.

Website hosting isn’t like basic home phone service. Once a plan is purchased it doesn’t just happen like hooking up the telephone. There are complexities to both buying and maintaining a website, not to mention creating one in the first place. Going blindly into the process can cause problems when things do not go as smoothly as hoped. The web offers a great deal of resources to those unfamiliar with the basic terminology and processes. This article covers a few that are easy to find and provide accessible information.

Completely New to the Internet
Those new to both the Internet as a whole, much less website hosting, have a little catching up to do. The BBC provides a fun visual guide to the absolute basics of the Internet with its “Webwise Online Course“. The course is available both in Flash and text versions. The Flash version is more visually engaging, and the Flash plugin should be fairly simple to obtain if it not already installed by default. Webportal About.com offers an entire section on the Internet for Beginners as well. They provide a variety of articles covering everything from email to web search and introductory netiquette.

Website Hosting Resources
Finding learning resources dealing specifically with website hosting can be difficult among the rather prolific variety of sites that would like to teach you and sell you hosting at the same time. Most significant website hosts have some learning resources on their sites, and these resources are important because they deal specifically with the applications their customers need to learn in order to use their hosting. It is important to choose a host with a solid online learning / tutorial section that clearly explains their tools.

More general information on website hosting as a whole can be found at the Devshed Web Hosters Portal. Along with articles dealing with current topics in the website hosting industry, they provide a variety of FAQs and HowTos that are more suited to the beginner than the seasoned professional. Learning this information is important before setting out to shop for website hosting services, as it will enable the customer to more objectively analyze the claims their prospective host is making.

There are a variety of forums devoted to website hosting, though these may or may not be friendly for the beginner. One of the largest is Web Hosting Talk. It is heavily trafficked and represents a good snapshot of current issues in the industry. There is usually no shortage of posters who will help out someone new to website hosting with answers to their questions.

Website Design Resources
Unlike hosting, the web is replete with forums, sites, and tutorials devoted to website design issues. What one will find useful in these resources is dependent on what is expected. Those seeking to learn the actual code behind websites, HTML, XTHML, and CSS for example, may find the W3Schools online tutorials useful. The W3Schools provide tutorials for everything from basic HTML to advanced scripting and database languages. They are presented in small, encapsulated formats, easy to take in short doses. About.com also has a web design section with various resources that cover not only coding, but common design programs such as Dreamweaver.

Conclusions
The web is well-stocked with resources to give the novice a helping hand. Hosting a website requires some basic skills and knowledge regarding the methods by which the hosting works. The resources listed in this article are by no means the only ones available. Open up your search engine of choice and more will be found easily. The resources provided by the hosting company are important as well, as they provide specific information on the applications the user needs to know in order to administer their account.

About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting articles.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as “support” materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the “About the Author” section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to the hyperlinks.