You Might Be Better Suited To Swimming With Sharks!
 by: Jay McCormack

Running a web hosting company is not as easy as it seems, in fact if I had to choose again maybe I would choose swimming with sharks rather than being a web host.

The learning curve for me was huge, so I thought I would share with you what I learned. Firstly you'll need to find a good webhosting company. I'm not going to pretend to recommend anyone in this article; you just need to search hard to find someone that has the right technology, the right bandwidth and the right support.

I ended up choosing a dedicated windows 2003 server with 250 Gb of bandwidth and 80 Gb of hard disk space. I can remote desktop to this server at any time to make any modifications I need which provides great flexability. But with this flexability comes complexity.

Your customers will expect the following from you:

- POP3 email and webmail
- Web site hosting
- FTP access
- Efficient billing
- Excellent support
- Statistics

Providing all of this is not easy and for the important things like statistics or email it's worth paying to get the right tools. If these things break then your customers yell and scream until their fixed.

For email I selected SmarterMail from SmarterTools. This is a great tool that provides POP3 and IMAP support and webmail. It integrates with virus software and SPAM software (with a little work) however it's reliable and easy to use.

I choose to stick with SmarterTools for Statistics and Support software also. These tools are not the cheapest available however they offer a great user experience. I love the support tool especially, and so do my clients. They can send an email to [email protected] and the support request automatically gets routed to the right person who then gets an email. The customer can manage the whole process just by replying to emails which makes it really easy for them. I manage the whole process through a simple web interface and can route requests to the right people responsible for fixing the problem.

The stats software is farily standard, it does have some nice graphics which customers like, and it's built to manage multiple domain names and sites which is perfect for a web host.

Billing is something that took a while to get sorted. Initially I just managed everything in an excel spreadsheet but that very quickly become too hard to manage. I then developed an Access database to help, which I quickly outgrew also. The main problem I found was that both of these solutions needed a human (me) to actually make them work. I needed something that was going to be completely automated. Just on a side note, most of my customers are small businesses looking for some hand-holding; as such they are not the sort of customer to 'sign-up' on a website for hosting. In fact that's not the product we really offer anyway.

Today I am running with an open source billing system called phpCOIN. This software allows me to set up recurring invoices that automatically get sent as they roll around. The new version to be released this year will actually deliver a PDF email which I'm sure my customers will like even more. This filled a huge void.

The final part in making all of this work was learning all about DNS. When I started this business I understood the concepts but had never actually made it work. I know what a DNS server did, but not really how. This is the one thing that can really screw you around if you get it wrong, because your customers are the first people on the phone when their website is down or the email is broken.

I would recommend a great deal of research in this area to ensure you are not in over your head. Once you learn about A records and MX records however, it really quite simple. There are many sites offering advice in this area, and I would head to some forums to get your questions answered quickly.

So am I happy to doing this? To be honest I love it! Running this system gives me the power to built websites on the fly, not only for my customers but for myself and my family also. And I know that the only person I need to rely on is me.

About The Author

Jay McCormack offers comments and suggestions on using software better on his blog, www.jaymccormack.com.