This question is the one many people ask themselves before purchasing their first VPS. Indeed, when you only check out the plans, you cannot tell for sure what intensity of RAM usage you expect. What you know, is the approximate amount of physical memory used by the software you are going to run on your VPS. Software system requirements, however, are usually not enough to estimate the real use of RAM needed for the particular application or script to operate, and thus it is hard to know how much physical memory the entire server with all its background processes in general is going to need.

There are some facts that you know that might help you there. For instance, we know that the server in its basic installation – usually LAMP – requires at least 128 MB of RAM. Choice of the control panel will make you add another 64 MB to your requirements (if your choose WebMin or DirectAdmin) or even 128 MB – if you want to run cPanel. This makes a minimum of 256 MB with a lack of operating options. What you can run there is email and FTP exchange (not intensive though) and hosting of simple websites. Dynamic and script-driven websites, such as CMS will also fit this configuration but you may need to implement many adjustments, some of which can limit the functionality of your online project.

If you look into running something more serious on the Web, you will need to search for a more solid solution. Let us review bigger VPS configurations and estimate what can be hosted there.

512 MB

This is one of the most popular configurations available on the market of VPS hosting. A VPS with 512 MB of RAM usually becomes a step-up for users who have never dealt with VPS servers before and who gave this type service a try on a smaller plan and then requested an upgrade.

If you want to host E-commerce software or run a script that is going to use your server resources constantly – a VPS with 512 MB of RAM is going to suit you perfectly. This plan will also fit those, who look into using a VPS as a platform for hosting reselling – simple shared hosting, of course. WordPress and Magento users will also find such a VPS a better luck, since 256 MB virtual machines never let them run those CMS full-throttle.

1024 MB

A one-Gig VPS is a choice of a Pro. Many gurus and experienced webmasters, as well as resellers and other online business holders, either purchase those servers at once or upgrade to them shortly.

If you deal with hosting reselling, you will find a VPS with 1024 MB RAM to be a perfect solution for serious reseller business. Unlike smaller VPS plans, those and higher let you offer the so-called Master reseller hosting which implies that your resellers will be able to sell hosting, too. And of course, a more powerful VPS will let you manage the clients easier. Indeed, if you have a thousand clients or more, whatever the business you do is, why should you partition them into groups to send emails hourly so as not to overload the server. You deal with e-commerce, so you must have some special offers and discounts and you want to be sure, everyone knows it – a powerful VPS will let you notify everyone at once without overloads or any other issues.

2048 MB

If you need a power of a dedicated server, but do not want to pay extra for the features you do not need, a 2 GB VPS is something you will like.

Those servers are usually the top ones among many VPS hosting providers and thus have the highest privileges on the carrier. This feature will make you feel absolutely comfortably on your VPS and it is worth it. Such a powerful VPS is heaven for big online projects and geeky things – those servers are capable of letting you refuse from standard server configuration, so one can easily install there such popular software as Java, Tomcat webserver, FFMPEG and many other tools, to make their online project a hi-tech multimedia pad.

We hope that this review of the most popular VPS plans helped you find out what you need or may need for your online business. If it did, you may like the news that since recently we run a special offer that has doubled RAM on all our VPS servers, so now our 256 MB, 512 MB and 1024 MB plans come with 512, 1024 and 2048 Megabytes of RAM accordingly.

If you want to run your own online shop you should not expect your expenses to be limited to renewal of your hosting account and domain. You will need to spend some more money to organize your business, so those expenses or let us call them investments, need to be as efficient as possible – you need to spend your money wisely. While some expenses cannot be avoided, some may be easily pruned – today we are going to let your know which exactly steps you can cut cost on and how.

Hosting

That’s where it all begins – the first mistake many e-commerce owners make is they get expensive hosting on a powerful server while having just a small website. What happens is they waste their money on hosting, which power they don’t exactly use full-throttle. This is something incorrect that needs to be looked after – if you are only launching your project, it is worthwhile to take a simple budget plan that will be enough for your needs while your business is being developed. Hosting providers are loyal about upgrades, so you are not going to have any troubles when you need to change your environment to something bigger and more powerful – you may even get a discount, so you can expect much money to be saved while acting that far-sighted.

Domain

Domain cost cutting usually comes down to getting a free domain along with your hosting account. That looks and sounds nice, but they usually offer only one domain – what if you need more? Well, you may need more since you may want to run your corporate blog or newsfeed or whatsoever under a separate domain, not a subdomain. You may also need to have some similar names “reserved”, so anytime a websurfer makes a typo, he or she gets to your and your website only. Finally, you may simply have several projects to run, so regardless of the purpose of multiple domains registration, you need to get them with as much profit as possible – therefore you need to find a registrar that offers discounts even on small batches of domains. Checking the latest deals, that registrars constantly offer may help you a lot with that, especially if you not only check their main website but media resources – blogs, Twitter and Facebook profiles, etc. – as well.

Advertising and promotion

That’s the very point you have a great deal of options at. To put it simple – the more manual work you do in advertising, the more money you save on it. What you can choose among is: guest blogging, link exchange, review posting, social media activity, affiliation and PPC. Of course, we can hardly tell you about each of those activities in many details, but a short review we are going to give you should help you with making your choice.

Guest blogging. This type of self-promotion will be useful if you offer some services. You will need to find a relevant guest blog, usually in business or in certain niche you particularly deal with and place an interesting eye-catching article that is going to represent you as a pro and show that your project is the one to trust. Since the idea of guest blogging is noncommercial self-promotion, your article should not look spamvertized, additionally, they may limit you in backlinking (usually 2 links are allowed), so you need to think carefully what those are going to be. If you have a blog, it’s advisable to put the first link there but not to your website directly.

Link exchange. This is another free way of advertising. Although it has lost its popularity lately, you can still gain something on it, but what you need to make sure about, is that the resource you are going to exchange links with is as relevant is possible, otherwise you may have issues with SEO that is going to harm your search engine visibility.

Review posting. This activity is kind of close to posting at guest blogs, but it allows your message to look more advertising. Review placement makes sense for many online businesses – what you need to do is find the directory that would match the niche of your business and leave a review about your company or about some of its services or products specifically. You can also search for websites that create listing of companies of a certain category. Reviews on such sites are usually left by prospect or existing customers, so adding your company information there will do you good, too. There is, however, something to look after –review posting and company listing can be both free and paid, so it’s always advisable to learn the website policy first.

Social media activity. This way of self-promotion can also be free or paid – depending on your goals. Usually you start with creation of a business profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and probably some other resources which is free. And then everything depends on your strategy – you may either pick your target audience manually by communicating with people and sharing interesting useful things, or simply grab and take them to your page using targeted ads.

Affiliation. This advertising activity is definitely costly, but what is good about it is that you define the cost on your own. If your business is about selling goods or bringing customers to use some of your services, you may look for some helpers among your most active clients. Of course, helpers need to be rewarded for what they do, so you need to work out an affiliate program that is going to deliver affiliate commissions for sales your partners make. If based on a percentage rate, your affiliate program is not going to take that much.

PPC. Finally we have come to the most popular and effective advertising activity – PPC marketing. This means involvement of such search engines as Google and Yahoo!. Talking about Google and namely its AdWords – one of the most powerful advertising tools so far we can’t hide the fact that it can’t be cheap. But if you setup your campaign effectively, your Return On Investment (ROI) is going to make you happy. Additionally, getting back to the topic of hosting we can give you a tip, that some hosting providers offer Adwords credits along with their hosting accounts. Apart from that, Google issues Adwords coupons so you may have some free credits on those, too.

Summary.

If you look into starting your own e-commerce project, you need to work out a business plan that is going to show you all the expenses you expect to have. If you are lucky and conscious enough, believe us those are going to be covered soon and effectively. If you don’t know where to start at – have a look at the E-commerce hosting plan we offer and Sitevalley.com. Give it a try with 30-days money back period and make sure you are on your way to success.

After we have delivered you numerous articles on different aspects of VPS hosting, we’ve noticed that we need to get back to this topic again. Once again we are going to talk about the problem of choice of a VPS server. This time we are going to take a look at this question under a different angle – let us share some interesting tips on how to tell if what you see when checking out the feature/pricing page of your potential VPS host is what you are going to get. While introducing you choice-making tips in our previous articles we usually referred to the technical aspect of VPS hosting, today we are going to analyze the VPS hosting from the point of view of a customer.

How much RAM do you get in fact?

When you see a 1 GB VPS plan at a very low cost, don’t be too fast in making optimistic conclusions. Check if this entire amount is guaranteed RAM. The best option is to contact sales support – then you are going to have a proof – a copy of your chat or email. But if you don’t have time for those checks, there is a quick way to find it out on your own – check the virtualization type used by this host. If it is XEN – be sure the entire 1 GB of RAM is guaranteed. If they use OpenVZ (the hosts that use it often say their VPSes are powered by Virtuozzo), there’s a risk, that their pricing provides the combined amount of RAM – guaranteed + burstable (RAM, that may be allocated only for a short period of time and thus – not constantly available). Since RAM is the main feature of any VPS server, this should one of the first points you verify before moving any further.

CPU units

Checking out pricing of some VPS hosts, one can find such feature as CPU units. This parameter shows the CPU frequency, available for the given VPS. Although it looks rather informative and lets the potential client compare the offered plans in more details, it’s not quite a correct way to represent VPS CPU specifications. To find out how powerful the CPU of the given VPS is, you need to know, what number of cores the entire VPS-carrier has, what their frequency is and how much of this power is delegated to the specific virtual machine – the latter factor depends on performance priority.

If you don’t know, how to interpret this information, you can simply ignore it. If you do need the details, you can have a brief consultation with the sales department of your potential host. This will let you find out the specifications of the carrier. The more powerful it is and the bigger the plan you are looking into, the more powerful your VPS is going to be.

Disk Space

Since VPS servers are usually offered as a fast solution that is cheaper than a dedicated server, those are not designed for large data processing. The minimal plan at some VPS hosts may offer as little as 10 GB of disk space. If you are going to host a few web pages, it’s alright, but if you work with email and databases, you need to consider disk space allocation rather carefully. Now let us count what you have in the end – after your server is setup, the system may take up to 2 GB of disk space. Any backup you make is going to create a file of the size approximately equal to the size of your /home directory. Not that much space left, isn’t it? That is why another Gigabyte of your virtual HDD may become vital. Well, it can also be taken by swap. According to the architecture of OS Linux, swap is a fixed disk partition, not a file, unlike on Windows – therefore, before you order a XEN-based VPS, you need to consult sales department first, to find out whether /swap is counted with the disk space offered or not.

Summary

If you want to be completely sure about your future VPS host, you need to find out as many details as you can before you actually sign-up for their services. Your potential host may not list everything on their web-page, it’s alright, but their sales and technical team should always be able to explain these or those aspects of hosting with their company. If it happens that some of your questions remains unanswered, you have serious reasons to not consider this host. If you are looking for an affordable and reliable VPS host right now, please spend another minute checking out our plans here at SiteValley.com.

We are back to the topic of affiliate marketing and today we are going to tell you what a perfect affiliate should look like. While running your own web hosting business you may need to involve different marketing tools for promotion of your company. If you involve affiliate marketing, you will need to work out an affiliate program that would look and actually be fair and interesting for people to start referring customers to you. The main interest is about the commissions, of course and you surely understand that they can’t be too high – otherwise you will hardly get any return. Still, the conditions of your program should attract your potential partners, so you are most likely to offer performance rewards or monthly commission raise after they bring you a certain number of referrals.

These measures are definitely going to work – you will start receiving affiliate program signup requests as soon as you announce your program and its conditions. If you are too open for partnership so you don’t even check and filter requests, you will get a great number of partners, but their performance may disappoint you. If you pick your affiliates and manage your program carefully you will later understand that some of your affiliates are worth being provided with higher commissions, sometimes, right from the start. Here’s who you should look for.

Socially Active People

If your affiliate is an active blogger or a forum member, or just has an active and popular Twitter and/or Facebook account –  rest assured, they will spread the word about your hosting company very soon. Blog and forum posts, commenting, tweeting, re-tweeting and status sharing – everything is going to work for you and your business. Socially active affiliates are also known for referring a lot of other affiliates to your service. Thus, if you offer commissions for tier affiliates (commissions paid to the master affiliates from commissions, gained by affiliates they referred), your partners will not only deliver you a lot of new customers, but a great number of new reliable affiliates, too.

Where to start from: first of all, you should look for relevant websites – those, whose owners deal with hosting or anything around it – software, hardware, optimization tips, client management and billing solutions, etc. Such resources are going to grant a flow of specific target audience that may be interested with your offers. Talking about blogs, it is advisable to check those that accept guest posts – those blogs have a wider audience. Referring to forum members it is recommended to check if your  potential affiliate is a moderator or an administrator – those users have more privileges, so they won’t experience hard times posting affiliate links around. As for social media users, the best solution is to search for people, who represent their business accounts on different networks.

Freelancers

Searching for affiliates among freelancers is also worth doing. To be more precise, you should search for those who offer website building or administration services and those who deal with software or search engine optimization. Those who hire freelancers for website adjustment needs, especially when planning to build the project from scratch or radically change it, are usually also intended to switch from their current host to a new one, or may even not have any hosting account at all. That’s how you are going to get your referrals – your service will be recommended.

Where to start from: Except for giving personal recommendations, freelancers may also draw customers to your service by advertizing your company via email links during correspondence with their potential clients. Thus you should look for freelance workers with well-developed and active profiles on LinkedIn and other related resources. The last but not least is the visitor impact – if freelancers who cooperate with you have their own websites – their links (and probably banners) will hit a greater audience.

Own Clients

Who can prove the quality of your service better than your own satisfied customers? Hardly anyone, therefore your customers are worth being provided with higher commissions. This is fair enough since apart from just placing promo materials, they can also back those with their positive reviews. And the more serious review sites they are going to use, the more truthful their recommendations will look. Customers’ sites can be used for promotion as well – “powered by” or “hosted at” shields, tidily attached to their home pages, may attract their visitors’ attention and bring dozens of sign-ups.

Where to start from: If review placement is something everyone can do for you, picking affiliating clients with the most attractive websites is a task for you to carry out. Websites to pay attention to first are the ones that require non-standard technical solutions and that host unique content. If the resource is built with a modified CMS e.g. you host a customized WordPress or Joomla website, it is most likely to attract attention of those visitors, who would like to host something like that. Although aspects of content and design hardly have anything to do with the web host, many people will instinctively check up the hosting provider first (at least, it is obvious, they support it!).

Affiliates

No matter how confusing it may sound to you, you should also cooperate with people who take part in affiliate programs at different hosting companies. You shouldn’t think about any competition there, but about the experience – people who work in partnership with several hosting providers know their pros and cons well enough to be able to distribute their promo materials so as to represent the best package offered by each web host. Involving such affiliates will also show you which advantages and drawbacks your hosting packages have.

Where to start from: The best solution is to find affiliates, who promote other hosting companies that do not offer the same range of services as you do. For instance you are good at VPS hosting, while the affiliate, you are looking into cooperating with, is in partnership with a company that provides shared hosting services only. The competition is minimized while you let this affiliate earn money on a wider range of products promoted.

The Bottom Line

Promoting your hosting company with the help of affiliate marketing strategies may facilitate your business much and significantly boost up the sales. You should however, make sure that the strategies you involve are not trivial and that you apply personal approach to any of your affiliates. This will let you build your A-team of affiliates with the best performance rates. We at Sitevalley.com look at re-arranging our affiliate program, so if you want to join our affiliate A-team – feel free to sign up.

If you deal with web hosting reselling you might have thought of different solutions that would bring you more clients while spending less funds to attract them. If you did, you must have definitely considered affiliate marketing as one of the most appropriate tools. Well, it really is, if you analyze the way it works. The thing is that this client attraction strategy requires minimum of preliminary investments. Whether you are going to place your advertising banners on some popular relevant websites or run a Google Adwords campaign, it means you will give out your money for a chance to attract more customers or partners. But what if your company cannot afford such investments that don’t grant 100% results while your service is really worth being promoted? That’s where affiliate marketing can help – you cooperate with partners, who help you promote your company and reward them for bringing you signups. A nice and promising strategy, isn’t it? Let us take a closer look.

How Affiliate Marketing Works in Web Hosting

Those who deal with web hosting usually call it an affiliate or partner program. To put it simple – hosting providers grant their affiliates rewards (commissions) for sales made by clients they refer. Affiliates may link their websites to the website of a hosting provider by placing special affiliate banners or hyperlinking URLs in some text adverts, testimonials or reviews, referring their visitors to you this way. As far as you can see it works the same way banner placement does, but you needn’t pay upfront. Of course it is vital to stay tuned and control all those referred sales and those who helped make them. And it’s rather easy to do that – you simply need to get some affiliate tracking software and integrate it into your billing system. This is going to let you know a) which sale was made; b) who made this sale and c) which affiliate referred it.

Such software usually has a full set of tools, so it will help you not only define the lucky affiliate, but also set a commission rate that is going to be his or her reward and set payout interval and minimal withdrawal sum. Additionally those systems usually support multi-level commissions, performance bonuses and other helpful tools. Another advantage of those systems is their client side that allows affiliates check their accounts and stay updated on their status – if they have any pending commissions, if they reached their withdrawal minimum or another level, etc. Finally, some types of affiliate software allow uploading banners and creating links, binding them to the ID of the specific affiliate, making tracking easier.

When a prospect client clicks the affiliate link the affiliate software tracks the date, the IP address of the referral and places the cookie of the page where they were referred from. The IP address and the cookie are tracked by the software database along with the name of the affiliate of affiliate ID. When the client finally buys some hosting package, the software will check the current data and match it with the data in the database. This allows identifying the affiliate who will be rewarded the commission.

This customer attraction strategy looks really simple and profitable – you give away a certain amount of a sure made sale as a commission, showing your appreciation and stimulating your affiliate to help you make more sales. Level or performance rewards system is going to work as a great stimulating factor and may significantly increase both the signups and common interest to your service, even if you have a few relevant and dedicated affiliates.

Organizing Your Affiliate Program

Being a hosting provider you should always be attentive to your clients. If you run an affiliate program, you are also attentive to your partners. No, your partners should not obligatory be your clients. Although a happy customer of yours may be the best advertisement for your business, there are many owners of well-visited relevant or just popular websites. And it doesn’t actually matter if they are hosted with you or not – don’t lose them. If they are interested in cooperation with you, welcome them to join your program – you will be surprised with the number of sale they may make.

Talking about attention and care we can’t leave policies unmentioned. Yes, no matter how simple your affiliate program is or looks like, you need to have everything confirmed and approved by a policy, better followed by Terms and Conditions. Such minor issues like sales made from a different IP address or after cookies removal may look pretty harmless… unless your affiliate demands to pay him or her this untracked (or unreal) commission. Policies may also be useful if your have a minimal withdrawal point and/or make delayed payouts (advisable method, so that you shouldn’t accept commissions for orders that were cancelled with refund).

According to the proverb – honesty is the best policy, so apart from creating papers you should also confirm them by your actions. Monitor sales and commissions, check their status and don’t ignore any complaints or support requests of your affiliates. If you prove yourself as a trusted hosting provider and reliable partner, you are likely to get tier affiliates – your affiliates will attract other people to become your partners.

Conclusion

If you run your hosting company and you feel like lacking signups – give it a try – start your affiliate program and watch new clients and new partners becoming a part of your business. If you are a blogger or an administrator of a busy forum or just an owner of an interesting and popular website who feels like making some more money with a trusted host – join affiliate program at Sitevalley.com.

Updated commissions and new payout system coming in 2011.

If you have your hosting business you have to take care of every single detail concerning your team, your hardware, your clients… and their billing. Today however, we are not going to talk about invoicing, transaction tracking or fraud control – our article is dedicated to money back guarantee.

Frankly speaking being a web hosting provider you are not obliged to have this policy and you may not offer money back with any of your services. On the other hand, offering money back may help your customers build trust in your company and the service you provide, which is a very important factor for attracting new sales.

Attracting Customers

Though it may look not very clear at first sight, offering money back does help attracting customers. Namely it increases the trust of the potential clients to you and your business. This works especially good for those hosting packages that use some new technologies – VPS servers, cloud hosting, etc. – or special hosting plans designed for hosting of particular software, e.g. blog hosting or e-commerce hosting. Even if there’s nothing special about the packages you offer, the money back guarantee is going to make your business look more serious and reliable.

Handling Billing

Although guaranteeing unconditional money back puts you under the risk of losing some funds, it secures you from a greater risk of losing even more funds in less fair way. We can’t say there were a lot of such cases but almost every host might have faced troubles with unexpected chargebacks and transaction disputes. The problem with those is not only about the fact you have to give back the money you earned on fair service provision, the problem is that you pay an additional chargeback fee that may make about $30 – $100 and even more sometimes.

Offering a money back guarantee lessens those risks much. As far as you know, hosting services require subscription and usually imply some funds being transferred upfront. By default the customer can have his or her transaction disputed within 6 month. If your hosting package has a minimal billing cycle of a year, it’s going to be 1.5 years – hardly a nice prospect for your business. A money back guarantee is something that is going to define the legal period for cost recovery, which means that even if a chargeback is requested, you have more arguments to dispute it and have it denied.

Tips and Tricks

Now you know why you need a money back guarantee. Let us find out which exactly way you need it to be offered. Below you will find some tips that are going to help not only hosting providers but regular clients as well. The former will learn which conditions it is advisable to offer money back on, while the latter will understand, what their providers mean by money back policy and how those policies work. This in turn is going to let the prospective clients make their choice with more trust and conscious.

First things first you need to create a policy. The clearer the policy is, the less misunderstandings you are going to have. One of the important points to consider is the money back period. Not only the time period should be fixed, but the starting point should be as well. The most recommended term to use is “XX days after initial signup” those three words disable money back guarantee for renewals or upgrades/downgrades. Another thing to take care of is the product you guarantee cost recovery for. If your client bought a hosting package and then a domain and/or a dedicated IP address along, while you refund only hosting packages – you should clearly mention it in your policy. If some services of yours do not include money back – state this, listing all packages this term concerns. The last but not least is the amount of funds to return – if your merchant takes some commission for reverse transfers, don’t leave this unmentioned. Otherwise you risk confusing your clients who are waiting for full cost recovery.

If you didn’t offer money back before – you now have reasons to start thinking of implementing it. Do it and watch more clients signing up for your services with more trust and pleasure. Apart from it you will secure your business from unfair actions of some customers, who we wish you never have. In case you are only looking into starting your own hosting business, check out our VPS hosting packages or dedicated servers – those are going to be a good launch pad for your own hosting company. Money back included

Everyone is searching for reliable hosting. Stability and reliability are actually the key features of any services offered on the market, but what makes those features so crucial when it comes to hosting? The trust and respect of the visitors, of course! If your website or online store goes down all the time, your visitors will not be interested in dealing with it. Nor will they care if it’s the store owner’s fault or the fault of their hosting provider. They will simply start purchasing products from a different online shop, which does not experience such issues. However, one should understand that 100% uptime is not possible and that different server side issues can take place. This primarily concerns small business websites using budget solutions. Thus, if you own some web service and cannot cover the server side aspect of hosting (e.g. if you use not a VPS or a dedicated server but a shared hosting package) you may need to use some recovery tips. Those are not actually aimed at downtime minimization, but they can lessen the impact on your customers and might help decrease their irritation.

1. Report on the Issue If you try to open your website in the browser while it’s down or experiencing serious issues, you will receive either the Server not found or the Internal Server Error (Error 500) message. The other visitors will receive one of those, too and will definitely close this browser tab. However some of them – featured customers, clients, your partners, etc. will be interested to find out what is going on. And you need to let them know. Sure, the best solution is to put a correspondent notification on your corporate forum or blog… but you need this forum or blog to be hosted on a separate server, otherwise those won’t be accessible as well. Thus, another solution – notify your customers/partners via social media – Twitter or Facebook (if your business still doesn’t have an account there, you should definitely consider registering one).

2. Use a Backup Communication Means

Some issues get resolved in less than half an hour. Some may take up to a day. No matter how long your site is going to be offline, you need to be available for your customers – this is very important since you are responsible for keeping them updated on the current state of your website. They may be waiting for pending transactions or activation of their services – you need to be able to provide at least the ETA and some urgent assistance (if the resolution of the issue does not require access to the website). Apart from using social media you will need some more reinforcements there. In order to provide maximum availability you should first of all let your customers know the mailbox for temporary contact. Since it is not advisable to provide your personal address, the best option is to create an account at some public mail server which username would correlate with your company name (e.g. mycompany@gmail.com). Instant messaging may also come in handy, so creating and sharing a backup AIM, ICQ or Google Talk ID is also recommended. If you have a landline, you can forward your customers and partners there, but if you provide phone support, established via VOIP – it may be reasonable to create a backup Skype user (also associated with your company name).

3. Prepare Some Predefined Replies

Once your website goes back online you will see a bulk of messages dropping into the mailbox at your company domain. No matter whether you managed to communicate with some of the senders during the outage, all of those emails need to be replied. Thus, you need to create some standard predefined reply which would contain an apology and official explanation. The latter should include the root cause of the issue and the description of the taken recovery and preventive measures. Those details should be obtained from your hosting provider, of course.

The risk of downtime is always present. Unfortunately, this is one of a few things in web hosting which cannot be always predicted, controlled and easily and quickly fixed. Even the most reliable hosts experience downtime and make their clients (and their clients in turn) suffer from that. In order to minimize this suffering and take as much care of the affected customers as possible, the tips mentioned above might come in handy. Stronger I hope, however that you will simply not experience anything like that ever.

Choosing The Right Solution. Image source: planetgreen.discovery.com

Last time we spoke about making a choice of a Virtual Private Server in terms of the configuration varieties. Today we are going to continue our research and tell some useful facts about types of websites, applications and services one may use on a VPS and the related dependencies.

There are many types of websites and online services on the Internet that differ by system requirements, performance or way of work. Sure, most websites work with a standard configuration and software set but some websites and especially services need an accurate configuration pick and fine software tune up. In this regard we are going to list the most popular services and applications in the today use and find a correspondent VPS-based solution for each. Well, let’s start.

1. Email and ftp transfer services

Email and FTP transfer

VPSes are widely used for establishment of certain separate services on them. If you want to get a simple email or ftp server which would need no constant web-access, you may get the simplest custom configuration of your virtual server, which would include just the OS and basic mail exchange/file transfer services. If you wish to run some additional scripts, you have LAMP installed as well (you will anyway need Apache in order to provide webmail access or check the uploaded files via web). In such cases the control panel is not essential (some users do not even include it to their orders) what makes the choice of the OS not crucial as well. Neither is the choice of the virtualization type. Such web-inactive resources do not usually require severe monitoring or many maintenance efforts, especially when strict connection quotas and transfer rate limits are set. CPU/RAM parameters may also be minimal, however those exactly parameters will let you define, which limits to set.

2. Simple static websites hosting

Simple website. Image source: techpin.com

If you have a simple website, which hosts static unchanged content and which is not frequently updated – a minimal VPS configuration is what you need. Depending on the visitor rate and activity of other servers (email exchange, ftp transfers, MySQL requests), you may choose one of the following options: 1) simplified maintenance and normal performance or 2) higher performance with less convenient maintenance

Choosing the first option you are likely to signup for a cPanel-based VPS with CentOS installed on it. While other control panels tend to be less resource intensive, cPanel/WHM provides you with ultimate maintenance and adjustment options, although this is going to cost you more RAM. Thus, you should choose a VPS with 512 MB of RAM. Such amount may look more than you actually need, but on the other hand it will provide you with reserve physical memory, needed for further growth of your project. Xen is more recommended, but OpenVZ virtualization may be used for cost cutting.

The second option is to provide higher performance rate for a lower price. This may somehow decrease the server management convenience level, but if you are good at basics of non-interface server administration you are not supposed to experience many issues. Your VPS will have no control panel or the least resource hungry one (WebMin or DirectAdmin) and will be able to run a “lighter” OS – FreeBSD. To gain more performance you may refuse from Apache (the LAMP classics) and have Nginx or LightHTTPD installed. Finally, you can choose the cheapest XEN VPS with 256MB on a board for the utmost productivity rate – XEN is more recommended for such configuration, since the more manual tune up you are going to bring in, the more you will feel the need of a fully virtualized server.

3. Hosting of dynamic and script-built websites

Script-built website code. Image source: blog.ning.com

Such websites as forums, blogs and online-stores are not those to spare money on – especially, if you use them for your business. Therefore you should look into the most stable configuration, which almost entirely excludes self-management (unless you or your web designer is familiar with server administration). The use of FreeBSD becomes questionable as well – this OS does require more experience of work with *NIX. As for the control panel – you are still able to choose between two of them – cPanel or DirectAdmin since both usually come with automatic script installers. LAMP set is not to be changed or tuned since any website software requires otherwise. The most serious question however is the virtualization type. The first thing to make sure about before selecting one is the completeness of your project: if the project is being tested or developed or simply going to keep growing – you should choose OpenVZ. This virtualization technology will be reacting smoother to all the changes, including load spikes and temporary memory overuse. If your project is final and the only thing to modify is the content – you can choose a XEN. On conditions, that no configuration changes are going to be made, such VPS can show you surprising performance. Recommended minimal RAM amount is 512 MB.

4. Default Resource Intensive Software

Resource Intensity. Image source: freeinfosociety.com

Among the script-built websites there are those, which software is resource intensive by default. Such scripts as Drupal or WordPress (especially enhanced with some plug-ins or add-ons) or any intranet or social networking software have high system requirements and need much server tune-up to be performed. Thus, the refuse of LAMP is the first step, very frequently offered by the webmasters. It is not even actually a refuse, though an enhancement, since Apache keeps working as a backend web server, while Nginx or LightHTTPD serves as a frontend. Since cPanel/WHM can provide the utmost maintenance and management option, it usually becomes a sole choice, which in turn emerges the choice of CentOS as the operating system. The most recommended virtualization type is OpenVZ since the temporary overload and memory overuse are much likely to be expected. The hardware configuration is 1024MB and higher. If you manage to find a 2GB RAM supplied VPS – you may think about XEN. Still, you should think twice.

5. Hosting Reselling on VPS

Reseller Business. Image source: flickr.com

Hosting reselling is one of the most popular online businesses, while VPS is the most popular way of its realization. Shared reseller servers can hardly provide the needed performance; additionally the limitations of the hosting provider may confuse a reseller and make him give up some of his or her ideas. A VPS offers perfect conditions for reselling – those however should be used wisely. If there is a choice the OS, the software set needs to be standard and not tuned. The control panel must be present on any conditions; it should be user friendly and intuitive enough, therefore the most recommended options are cPanel and DirectAdmin. Virtualization type does not matter much, but if you oversell it is recommended to choose OpenVZ. Minimal RAM amount is 512MB (regardless of the control panel type).

The Bottom Line

When we released the first part of our research, it was not as detailed as it should be to get a full picture. Now we can say that the analysis of particular website and service types might be more helpful for those, who consider a VPS as a hosting solution but are not yet sure about the preferred configuration. If you have more examples of VPS hosting usage or want to share what you or your friends host on a virtual private server – don’t hesitate to leave your comments or take part in a discussion at our Facebook page.

If you have already made up your mind regarding the VPS configuration you would like to have, take a look at the VPS plans we offer at SiteValley.com. The variety of virtualization types and control panels, flexible prices and friendly support – that’s what you are going to get there.

Choosing The Right Way. Source: thefrisky.com

When website owners decide to purchase a Virtual Private Server for their websites, they are often concerned about its configuration. If upgrading from a shared hosting account, a user may pick a too weak server and put it down right after the website launch, as virtual servers do not have such strict limits on resource usage set, as shared ones do.

If someone is purchasing a VPS at once, without having the site actually tested elsewhere before, its owner may pick a wrong software configuration and not even have the website started (we don’t think that error pages hosting is funny or profitable).

A fair question is “Which VPS configuration to choose to provide my website with the most optimal hosting solution?” Here go the answers.

VPS Configuration Types

Virtual private servers differ in their configuration by many parameters. Those usually depend on their vendors’ likes and commercial interests; presence of trained personal, able to work with this or that software; welfare and funding, etc. Studying the market of VPSes we can define the following main configuration options:

1. Virtualization Type

Virtualization Technology. Source: ibm.com

Nowadays there are two most popular virtualization technologies – Xen and OpenVZ. We have already talked about both and compared them, so to make the long story short, we are just going to tell, that Xen technology supports full virtualization and a wide range of operating systems. It does not have any inter-carrier shared resources, what makes the work of each server autonomous (there is even a separate /swap partition created under each virtual machine). OpenVZ is a specialized Linux-solution, which is faster but it lets the carrier share resources (RAM/CPU), what may cause overload issues to both virtual and physical machines. On the other hand, resource sharing allows OpenVZ users to get temporary RAM-boost – so-called burst-RAM.

2. Control Panels

Most Popular control panels

When one speaks about comfortable and user-friendly hosting, they first of all mean the control panel. A control panel is very important for site management, so it’s easy to imagine how essential it is for administration of the entire server. VPS vendors usually provide control panels on a partnership basis or as license resellers. This allows them to both get licenses at lower cost and provide control panels either for free along with the VPS’s or for a significantly smaller price. Leading VPS control panels are DirectAdmin and cPanel. cPanel has a VPS-optimized build which may be a perfect solution for those, who strive for automation. There is one more panel, frequently offered by VPS vendors – Webmin – free open source server/account management software.

NOTE: cPanel is a resource intensive panel compared to Webmin or DirectAdmin. The former requires 256 MB RAM for full functionality, while the latter ones – only 64 MB.

3. Installation of Basic Services

Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Source: graphicsyork.com

The generally installed software-bind is known as LAMP – Linux + Apache + PHP + MySQL. This configuration works well with any kind of sites and is recommended for use. Some scripts and serious web-projects, however, require different pieces of software. The most frequently substituted element is Apache – the webserver. Users install LightHTTPD or Nginx instead, to improve the web-content processing speed. It is a known trick, so many VPS vendors offer either blank servers (without software and sometimes even the OS preinstalled) or custom software set installation.

NOTE: LAMP is the most recommended software set for cPanel-based servers, as cPanel allows to manage all services via web-interface.

4. Operating Systems

Linux and FreeBSD. Source: linuxwallpaper.net

One of the best Linux distros, which has proved its reliability is CentOS, so no wonders it is one of the most frequently setup default OS, provided on VPSes all over the market. The vendors, however understand that the users are interested in customization, so they offer other distors, too. The most popular are Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo. Additionally, many offer FreeBSD (Unix).

NOTE: Though FreeBSD is faster in some extent, it is not recommended for use with cPanel, as far as FreeBSD may start malfunctioning after automatic cPanel update.

5. Amount of RAM and Disk Space

Piece of Hardware. Source: fuhrmann-itservice.de

Those parameters are usually set according to the carrier server specifications. Before the VPS hosting plans are created and approved, the marketers study the demand for this or that plan type (usually studying competitors’ plans with more or less similar quotas) and their actual relevancy (e.g. instead of buying some top VPS plan it may sometimes be more desired to get a dedicated server for almost the same amount). So far the most popular RAM quotas are: 256, 512 and 1024 MB. The disk quota has more floating values, the minimal is usually 20 GB, while the maximal may vary from 80 GB to 120 GB

Matching The Details

Say, you have picked a host you would like to get a VPS from. You studied the plans they offer and their pricing seems to look good. Before you make your final decision and signup, you need to match all the details of their plans and pick the most optimal solution for you website.

Let’s make a test draft of the desired VPS:

Pick the desired disk space quota, we consider it 50 Gb coming with 512 MB RAM -> this means you can have cPanel installed without any problems -> this in turn means, you need CentOS, or any other Linux distro. The choice of cPanel also means, that you may have LAMP configuration set freely. Finally, virtualization type -> you have enough RAM for your server functionality, so no need in burst-RAM seems to emerge. On the other hand, 50 Gb of disk space is enough to share 1 GB for swapping.

Or another option:

Imagine you are a starter. You need the simplest VPS and you get it: 20 GB of disk and 256 MB of RAM. Not much to host a site, which would beet up Youtube or Facebook, but it’s your own virtual server! Let’s go: as there is not much RAM you may forget about cPanel -> this enables you to choose FreeBSD as an OS and Nginx or LiteHTTPD as a webserver. We seem to be getting a pretty light server. To finalize it, we choose OpenVZ to save the disk space and be able to temporarily boost our RAM up.

Summary

We need to admit, that the drafts provided were made up without sites differentiation in mind. We took it for average, to show how this analytic procedure should flow and what the choice of this or that configuration should be based on. There are, however, many sites and many site-building technologies. Each of them has its own peculiarities. This is the very point, were are going to tell about next time. So, await Part 2 released soon.

There is a correspondent discussion raised on our Facebook page. Feel free to take part.

You probably remember our articles on how to pick a platform for reseller hosting business and Reseller billing software comparison. As we continue the series of useful articles for resellers, the next thing we are going to talk about is domain reselling.

What Does It Work For?

Domain reselling business is to some extent easier to run than hosting reselling, and because of this many people choose to conduct this business. The advantage is obvious – unlike a hosting reseller, you don’t need to administer anything but the name servers (in most cases only once – after the domain purchase) and you are not supposed to resolve any technical problems, as there can hardly be any. What you need to do is just watch them being updated on time.

Taking into account the latest trends of services unification, it becomes understandable that in order to attract more customers a company should provide a range of services. Thus, to become a successful hosting reseller you also need to provide domain reselling. Your clients will be really glad to realize that they can pay for several services using one client area. Additionally, this will make things easier for both you and them in terms of support – you will be able to manage your customers’ domains.

How It Works?

Domain reselling is a special service, offered by domain registrars. The idea of this service is to increase the domain sales by attracting new registrants not directly, but through a reseller. This idea became very popular since domain reselling is more profitable for both the registrar and the reseller, than an affiliate program, which is not that easy to manage, considering the amount of domains sold annually.

Being resellers, registrants are able to control all their resold domains under their own accounts and to set custom prices. Branding is allowed as well. Branding option may be useful, if a simple reseller wants to become a featured one or even a domain investor. Usually, domain resellers choose a range of TLDs they are going to offer. Usually, the so-called popular TLDs: .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ. Domains with such TLDs used to have a floating price on the market and considering the discounts, the registrars provide their resellers with, the latter can make a good profit out of it. Additionally, being a domain reseller, a hosting reseller can make such marketing moves as free domain provision for the top hosting plan.

Summary

Reselling is a nice small business solution for those who do not have their own platform to start an own independent company. Such business, however, is a perfect launch pad, so it should be organized so, that it would look professional. We hope, that tips we publish will help you with improvement of your business. Next time we are going to bring out more ideas on how to improve your reseller business, as it may grow into a standalone company one day.