Planning your webhosting business

Posted on August 17, 2012 by sbechara

In my last article, I talked about the factors which should be present in order to become a successful webhost. In this article, I will talk about planning for the success of your webhosting company.

In order to become successful, you will need to plan for your webhosting company’s success. At the heart of your planning phase is a business plan. A business plan helps you put all your thoughts on paper prior to starting your webhosting company, and helps you identify any issues which need to be addressed prior to launching your business. A business plan is primarily composed of the following sections:

Products and Services
Market Analysis
Marketing Strategy
Sales Strategy
Milestones
Management Summary
Financials

Since it is technically impossible to cover all of the above aspects in one article, I will start by taking a look today at the products and services a webhost can sell, and will discuss the subsequent sections in later articles.

Products and Services to consider selling:

Domain registration services: Usually, there isn’t much profit to be made here. However, if you’re offering shared and reseller hosting services, you will need to offer domain registration options, because many clients bundle their domain name with their shared or reseller hosting service.
Shared hosting services: While there is a margin profit to be made here, you will need to provide very good support, since all your competitors are doing it. I highly suggest you hire a service company which provides outsourced hosting support. This will ensure that you’re providing 24/7 support, at the fraction of hiring a full-time employee.
Reseller hosting services: This offering is very similar to shared hosting services, except that you’re allowing your clients to resell hosting services to their clients. Therefore, your support will need to be even better since your customers are business owners, and will lose money every time your service is unstable.
Dedicated Servers: A dedicated server is a physical hardware computer with high specifications, which will be dedicated to one client only, whereas a shared hosting account resides on a server shared with other accounts, as the name implies.
VPS hosting services: A virtual private server (VPS) is a part of a dedicated server, functioning as a dedicated server, through a software technology called virtualization. This technology allows you as a company, to sell a VPS to your customer, which almost functions as a dedicated server, at the fraction of a price of a dedicated server.
Cloud hosting services: While a VPS server is usually part of a dedicated server, a cloud server usually sits on top of a server farm, which usually consists of hundreds of physical servers or more. This allows your server instant upgrades to virtually unlimited resources and failover abilities.

My next article will talk about additional streams of income for webhosts, by selling products and services which will complement your webhosting offerings. Stay tuned!

Samer Bechara is a business consultant who specializes in business planning, online marketing and web-based technical solutions. He can be reached through his website, Thought Engineer.

Remarketing and What it Means for Small Businesses

Posted on August 10, 2012 by kchandler

It has happened to all of us. You visit a website to checkout a new video game or the benefits of a new air miles credit card. Then, for the next two weeks no matter how many sites you visit, you see highly targeted ads related to that exact product. The first thing that runs through our mind is, “how do they do that!?”. Well it’s called retargeting and their niche in the digital marketing space just got a little crowded.

Previously if you wanted to run this style marketing campaign you were forced to go with the pricey systems like Retargeter or Ad Roll with the huge minimum ad spends that only big brands could afford. However, it is now in reach for us small businesses thanks to Google’s Remarketing, an extension of Adwords.

Although released in beta in early 2010 it has finally been opened up to all Adwords accounts during the latest UI updates from Google. With this update it allows business that have small budgets but big ideas succeed. Here is an example/campaign that helped a small power supply company make the most of its ad budget.

Case Study:

With a recently launched redesign of their website they had a targeted conversion point for customers which was a request a quote form. Their current paid search conversion on this form was a measly 0.96%. After a little research we found that the majority of the customers were not comfortable with the amount of information that was needed to fill out the form. So in order to educate them more on the products, we re-engaged them:

Not only did this achieve a conversion rate of +6%, it only cost them $0.20 per click and an ad budget of $10/day. It really breaks down to three major pain points that Google solved for small businesses with Remarketing:

Price Point: It lowered the price barrier allowing companies with budgets under $10,000 a month to do effective marketing. In fact, the only minimum budget that Google requires is $0.05 per click and a daily budget of $1.00.
Ease of Use: They integrated a complex marketing approach in a familiar environment, Adwords. Many online marketers are already aware of this software and are well versed in using it.
Reach + Relevance: Unlike traditional or outbound marketing you have the vast reach of the Google Display Network but the highly relevant impressions with customers that are already engaged with your brand.

So my challenge to you is to go out and start playing around with this neat and easy to use tool. The possibilities and layers of engagement are endless. If you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments below. I also frequent the Adwords/Analytics help forums as well as SEOMoz’s Q&As - so feel free to reach me there as well.

Cheers - Kyle

Kyle is a search engine marketer for a full service design and marketing agency out of Cleveland, Ohio. Throughout his career he has worked with brands including Purell, Cleveland Clinic, Fazolis, American College of Radiology, Cleveland Cavaliers and BMW. You can learn more about Kyle’s work at his personal portfolio, www .kyledchandler .com .

Are you a member of the Drupal Association?

Posted on August 9, 2012 by ltrudeau

If you answer: yes, of course! I say thanks very much for supporting the best open source community ever! You should skip to the bottom to learn the ways you can help the Drupal project.

If you answer: what is this Association? I say:
The Drupal Association (DA) is a not-for-profit organization with the mission to help Drupal flourish. We help the Drupal community through a variety of programs and the benefits are seen in the Drupal project. Since Drupal is growing every day, the DA works to keep the growth sustainable by handling the day-to-day tasks that fall outside of working specifically on Drupal software. In fact, the DA has no authority over the planning, functionality, and development of the Drupal software because all of this is decided by the Drupal community.

Instead, the DA focuses on several key projects:

maintaining Drupal.org infrastructure and upgrades
empowering project contribution
providing Community Grants
hosting DrupalCons and funding DrupalCon Scholarships
organizing Global Training Days
legally protecting the Drupal project

There are many ways to get involved in the DA. Membership costs $30 (€22) year for Individuals or $100 (€73) year for Organizations. Your company can become a Supporting Partner or you could give time towards key projects to help make possible our strategic community initiatives.

Join Us Today! https://association.drupal.org

If you are ready to jump in and give time to help Drupal, there are many options:

search the issue queue for open issues that would benefit from your knowledge or opinions http://drupal.org/project/issues/
join your local Drupal User Group or a group that shares your interests on groups.drupal.org
check out the forums where people are asking and answering all kinds of questions drupal.org/forums
dig around on Drupal.org since there is a wealth of information there for you.

Command Line Basics Part 1: moving around the file system

Posted on July 3, 2012 by csteffen

Previous post in this series available here.

One of the advantages of a command line over a graphical control system is that you have a very very rich set of commands to run, and very fine-grained control over how they're run. The dis-advantage is that you don't have "menu"s to choose commands from, so you need a base of knowledge before you can do anything. This post and the few after it are my attempt to give you a crash course on the vital basics of doing stuff on a (perhaps) virtual Linux machine with a remote command line login.

The first thing you'll do is "log in", or establish a connection to your virtual server. You'll use some sort of tool to do that, depending on the operating system of your local machine. If you already have a unix-like machine (including Linux), you'll probably open a command window and connect to the remote machine using the command "ssh" for "Secure SHell". If you're on a Windows machine, you'll use a program like "PuTTY". In either case, when you first get logged on you'll see a blast of general information from the machine and then a "prompt":

The prompt is the thing at the bottom that is basically the remote machine saying "Ok, I'm ready for your next command". I've set up my prompt to tell me my username, what machine I'm logged into, what time it is, what directory I'm in ("~" in this case), then the "$" character indicates the end of the prompt and that's where the cursor sits, ready for you to type.

Directories in these machines are in a hierarchy. Unlike Windows (or DOS), the file system in a Unix-like machine isn't relative to a physical drive (like "C:"). Directories are mapped to underlying media, but in a way that's mostly invisible. All directories stem from a "root" directory that doesn't really have a name; it's just referred to as "/". The root directory of a file system will have 0 or more sub-directories, each of those will have 0 or more sub-directories, and so on down. Files can reside in any of these directories. Below briefly explain three important commands which tell you the current directory, change it to a different one, and see what's there.

Any time you have a prompt, you have some notion of your "current" directory. The command "pwd" (Print Working Directory) tells you which directory you're in. pwd is usually used without options.

The command "cd" (Change Directory) is used to change the current directory to a different one. It can be invoked several ways. "cd XXX" changes to a subdirectory of the current directory with the name XXX; this is a relative directory change; where you end up depends on where you are. "cd /XXX" changes to the directory /XXX/ no matter where you are (the leading slash makes it an "absolute" directory change).

There are a couple of useful other invocations of cd. "cd .." is a relative directory change, but instead of changing to a subdirectory of the current directory, it changes to the parent of the current directory (the name is not required since each directory is only the subdirectory of one parent). In other words, in general, running "cd XXX" then "cd .." puts you back where you started.

One other invocation of cd is "cd" with no arguments. That's a special case that is an absolute directory change that puts you back in your "home" directory. Every user on a unix-like system has a point in the file system where your own files are stored (as opposed to the files that make the system run or are part of the operating system). You store your own files there as well as files that will set up your environment (another post).

The third command, command "ls" (for "list", I guess) is used to list the names of the files and the subdirectories in the current directory. With no arguments, list just gives a complete listing of all the contents of a directory, including subdirectories and files together. (How to distinguish them will be a later post.)

Here's an illustration of me logging in and moving around in the directories on my virtual server. You'll notice that my prompt here tells you what the current directory is at each step, so using "pwd" is superfluous here. However, no matter what your prompt is, even if it gets messed up sometimes, pwd will always tell you where you are, so I've used it that way here. (Words that appear like this in the trascription aren't actually part of the session; they're notes to you, the reader.)

This gives you a very basic idea of the mechanics of moving around the directory tree. The best way to try this is to log into your own server and see what's there. If you ever get confused about where you are, the command "cd" by itself will always return you to your home directory, and "cd /" will always return you to the root of the file system.

Next time, I'll talk about the file system layout in general and some of the useful places to go.

Craig Steffen cut his command-line teeth on MS-DOS 2.11 round about 1986 or 87; his first Unix-like OS was NeXT-Step on NeXT computers in 1991. He used Solaris, Irix, and increasingly Linux in graduate school, and runs mostly (Ubuntu) Linux nowadays. He lives in appalachia but oddly works for a mid-west University. In his spare time he mucks around with his vintage VW and occasionally flies small airplanes. You can see more at his blog and on twitter.

You think you know a lot about cPanel & WHM? Prove it with cPanel University.

Posted on June 29, 2012 by tellis

cPanel University (cPU) is the brand new set of exams to test the technical and sales skills with cPanel & WHM. These are not your basic, participation ribbon certificates. cPanel University Professor Todd Thrash says, “The tests are brutal and passing means you possess functional, concrete knowledge of cPanel & WHM.” The tests are designed to be hard and boasts a passing rate of only 30%. cPanel offer two tracks, sales and technical, to concentrate focus on the different aspects of the product.

There are five phase levels of testing - Base, Professional, Expert, Veteran, and Master. When cPanel had two leading web hosting companies take the test, only two students passed 3 out of the 5 testing levels and went onto the fourth level - the Veteran Test. "With 5 years of experience with cPanel this test was a challenge to pass, although I only got to Expert I am confident with more focus and training I can get Master Certified," said Matthew Harris from leading web host. “The test definitely touches base on Linux knowledge as well as advanced cPanel skills and is a good measure of who really knows cPanel."

Why should you get cPanel Certified?
I am glad you asked. You did ask, right? Of course you did. The cPanel Certifications are a benchmark of what the staff knows about the product. They prove how much cPanel & WHM skill a person has.

Who should get cPanel Certified?
Sales and Technical people should take the respective exams. Any company that wants to ensure their sales teams are not just being effective but maximizing the profitability of their cPanel offerings should ensure their sales teams are certified.

I want to take this awesome test, how do get in?
There is no need for an application or interview, head to university.cpanel.net and sign up now. There are five per track, one basic and four advanced. The basics are available 24/7/365 and are online.

When can take the advanced exams?
The advanced are only administered when cPanel University Proctors are on site at select venues. The two key events planned for 2012 are HostingCon and cPanel Conference.

Can’t get enough of the awesomeness that is cPanel University? Get over to univerisity.cpanel.net to check out the test and learn more!

Travis Ellis is a Marketing Associate at cPanel, Inc. Travis creates content, works with event planning, and contains a unique blend of SysAdmin and Communications Nerd. This allows him to go from command line to entertaining guests in no time flat. Travis is the Marketing Contact for cPanel University and works with the cPU team.

Command Line? What’s that, and what do I do with it?

Posted on June 1, 2012 by csteffen

One the reasons that I've gone with vps.net for my web hosting and blogging is because some of their virtual machine install options are full virtual machines with ssh access. That means that I can log into the "machine" remotely via a text terminal, move files, change software configurations, and even write software I want to. I'm a slightly old-school computer person; I prefer to use keyboard commands to a mouse if at all possible, and the command-line suits me very well. This is the first in what I hope is a series of blog posts on what command-line style system configuration is, some of the basics of doing it, how and why you'd want to, and some of the neat tricks that are available to you when you have a direct connection to the machine.

There are a lot of factors that make command-line different than graphical-type controls; I'll talk about some of those factors in future posts. One of the advantages of a command-line interface is it gives you direct access to configuration files in the machine's file system. Some configuration is store in databases, but a whole lot of operating systems and software read configuration from text files on disk when they start up. A command-line interface gives you the ability to read and modify the location and contents of those files directly. This is a very powerful tool when something goes wrong and the graphical tools can't fix it.

I ran into an example of this type of utility while preparing this post. I needed to add a configuration option to the Apache web server on my vps.net virtual machine. Apache has been around a long time; it's very much an old-school text-file configuration piece of software. I wanted to enable a user (me) to display a page from their own directory, rather than putting in the main web directory. To do this, I had to turn on the "user directory" option.

Here's sort of what it looks like. The lines that look like this: "craig@openclasses 09:11 ~ $" is what's called a "prompt". This is a string of text that says the computer is ready for my next command. What comes after that on the same line is what I typed. Then between that line and the next line is what the computer sent back to me in response.

Here's me logged into my server. The "cd" command is me going from my home directory to the configuration directory that Apache uses. Then I use the "ls" command to check for the "user directory" module. The list of files in that directory doesn't have anything that says "userdir". I then do a listing of a different directory, which does contain two userdir files (highlighted in red).

The fact that the userdir files are in the "available" directory means I've installed the userdir option into Apache, but I haven't told Apache to enable it.

So to do that, I make a symbolic link from the "available" directory to the "enabled" directory. This is like a "shortcut" in windows. It makes a file appear to also be somewhere else. "ln" is the command to create a link. I forgot I need administrator privileges to do that, so it tells me "permission denied". "sudo" is a command that gives you administrator rights for a single command, in this case "ln" to create a link. Then I ls the directory again, and this time the userdir files are there. Success!

So that was a real-life example of logging into a server quick to change the configuration of a piece of software via the command-line interface. There will be more to come here, stay tuned!

Craig Steffen cut his command-line teeth on MS-DOS 2.11; his first Unix-like OS was NeXT-Step on NeXT computers. He used Solaris, Irix, and increasingly Linux in graduate school, and runs mostly Linux nowadays. He lives in Appalachia but oddly works for a mid-west University. In his spare time he mucks around with his vintage VW and occasionally flies small airplanes. You can see more thoughts of his at his blog and on twitter.

What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

Posted on May 24, 2012 by rholmes

By the number of flyers stuck to my front door, sticking out of my mailbox, and tucked under the wiper blade of my car... I think I’m safe in saying that my local restaurants, cleaning ladies, roofers, grocery stores, dry cleaners, window washers, painters, etc, etc, etc are desperate for ways to stay in front of potential customers.

There is a way to stay in front of potential customers online that likely costs less than paying people spam houses and cars in the neighborhood. Two well known companies give you the tools to put your ads in front of targeted audiences at very low prices: Facebook and Google.

Facebook - Targeted Advertising on the Cheap

Facebook allows you to choose the people you want to target very carefully. You can select gender, age, location, and even get into what they like and don’t like. If you know your target market’s demographics, using Facebook’s simple system, you simply focus in on those people, create a very simple ad that even has an image in it, and your ads begin appearing in the right-hand column of the targeted people’s Facebook pages.

Yes, you do have to pay for these ads, but like most online ads these days, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. And, part of the reason Facebook’s stock has slid nearly 20% in two days is because people know that the only 5 in 10,000 people click on those ads. That’s potentially 9,995 people seeing your ad without you paying a dime!

Bonus Info: People burn out on Facebook ads very quickly—they literally stop noticing them because they see the same ad dozens of times a day. To prevent ad burn out, rotate your ads. Facebook ads are easy to make, so make several and rotate them regularly.

Google’s Remarketing – Visibility for Pennies

Google has a great AdWords product that allows you to put a cookie on the browser of anyone who visits your site. This is referred to as putting these visitors into your remarketing audience. When these visitors go to another site that has advertising delivered by Google—there are over 1 million websites and hundreds of millions of pages that have ads delivered by the online advertising giant—Google can see they’re in your audience and will display your ads to them.

What could be better than staying in front of people who have been to your site—they are in some way interested in your products and services. The vast majority of people do not become a customer on their first visit—stay in front of them and encourage them to come back.

Like Facebook, Google gives you some great tools to make very powerful ads. And like Facebook, they only charge you if/when someone clicks on the ad. Maybe one of the reasons Google’s stock is doing better than Facebook’s is because on average ads on Google’s display advertising system are clicked on 40 out of every 10,000 views.

Bonus Info: Your ads only begin showing up after 500 people are in your audience, so get the code on your website ASAP to begin building that audience. Don’t let creating the perfect ad hold you back. Make a really simple ad to begin with—you can build the real ads later.

Visibility Still Matters

Lemonade Stand 300x199 What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

Any kid who moves her lemonade stand to the corner of two busy streets can tell the GM geniuses, you need to be visible to sell.

The high-paid marketers at GM don’t seem to understand that staying in front of potential customers is important. Last week they very publicly announced that they were going to stop advertising on Facebook because it wasn’t selling cars.

Internet marketers tend to focus on the aspects of online marketing that are quantifiable. It’s what they love about Internet marketing—everything can be measured. This measurability tends to blind Internet marketers to the fact that visibility and branding still have an important role to play, even it can’t be measured to tenths of percents.

Thanks to Todd Bates for sharing the sandwich board photo and Geoff Sowery for sharing the lemonade stand photo via the Creative Commons license.

BIO

Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo

VPS.NET

Tag Archives: Guest Blogger