Image via WikipediaA while back I decided I'd jump on the web hosting reseller bandwagon. I looked around at several reseller accounts and in the end plumped for Heart Internet, I signed up for their reseller account at £29.99 pcm plus VAT. For that you basically could host unlimited sites with unlimited features (web space, bandwidth, email accounts and so on).
First thing I did once I signed up was to create an account for myself and transfer my web site across. This is my default site (www.newbeltane.com), and not my ecommerce site (hosted with BigCommerce). No problems there (at least not initially).
The next thing I did was to set up some web hosting packages, decide on features for each one and a price. I then had to set up another web site to sell my hosting packages. I had already registered a domain for this purpose (www.newbeltanetechmedia.com) Once this was set up (again on my Heart Internet hosting package) I then logged into my reseller account to set up the white label pages so that when people clicked on the links for any of the hosting packaged they would see my corporate identity and not that of Heart Internet. This is how most reseller accounts work. You can, of course, leave things so that folk soon realise that they are actually hosting their site with the same company as you yourself and this in essence, gives the game away that you are not an independent web hosting company but actually a reseller.
Whatever one thinks of the ethics of white label reseller accounts it is how most resellers work. Not everyone can afford to have their own real servers in a modern and expensive data centre and pay the enormous fees that it costs to have a direct connection to the network.
Once I had done all this I was ready to start marketing my web hosting services. Right away though I hit some major problems. Whenever I would log into my reseller account and tweak one thing or another (and there is a lot of tweaking to do in the early stages), I would get a lot of timeouts. This is where the page refuses to load and your browser instead gives you a blank page and error message. This would happen on a very regular basis and soon became most frustrating. I flagged it up with Heart Internet and they tried to resolve the issues. However, they couldn't and to cut a long story short, even after giving me 3 months for free, the situation did not improve.
I decided that I had instead to look elsewhere but the problem was, would I hit the same issue elsewhere? Could in fact the problem lie with my connection to the internet or my computer> Well, having tried on two different internet connections I was pretty sure the issue lay with Heart Internet. Now I know it did. How do I know this? Well, I decided that the normal reseller option was not for me and being a little uneasy about the ethics of being a reseller who goes down the white label route, i had decided to change tack somewhat.
Instead of being a reseller in the normal sense I decided to rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and host client's sites on this server. A VPS is basically a marketing term used by Internet hosting services to refer to a virtual machine for use exclusively by an individual customer of the service. The term is used to emphasize that the virtual machine, although running in software on the same physical computer as other customers' virtual machines, is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer, is dedicated to the individual customer's needs, has the privacy of a separate physical computer, and can be configured to run as a server computer (i.e. to run server software). The term Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS is used less often for the same concept.
Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system and can be independently rebooted.
The practice of partitioning a single server so that it appears as multiple servers has long been common practice on mainframe computers and mid-range computers such as the IBM AS/400. It has become more prevalent with the development of virtualization software and technologies for microcomputers.
In my case, I decided to go with WebhostUK Limited. For £39 pcm (inc. VAT) I would have a VPS offering:
| Ram - Guaranteed | 384 MB | |||||||||||||
| Ram - Burst | 768 MB | |||||||||||||
| Allocated - CPU | 533 Mhz | |||||||||||||
| Disk Space | 30 GB | |||||||||||||
| Bandwidth | 300 GB / mo | |||||||||||||
| IP's Available | 2 | |||||||||||||
| Operating System | Centos 4.x | |||||||||||||
| Free Control panel | Cpanel / Plesk |
Now you may ask how I could be sure that my new account would be any better. Well, I had no guarantee and that's why I choose WebhostUK over some others, as they offered me a 30 day rolling contract without locking me into a long contract. there are some keen prices out there but when you dig a little deeper, you find that you need to sign up for two years to get that price.
As well as looking at the contract, I did some online searches for reviews and found a great site that does reviews of all sorts of things, including web hosting companies. The reviews are written by the site's visitors and so reflect the experiences of real individuals. Check out their review of WebhostUK here at http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews245701.html and you will see that score 4.0 out of 5, based on 13 reviews. Heart Internet by comparison scored only 3 out of 5 based on 85 reviews.
Now, to be clear, my experience is such that I would rate them just 1 out of 5 (the 1 is for their helpfulness in trying to resolve the issues I had and their friendly manner). However, some folk give them 5 out of 5 so my experience is far from typical. However, if I had come across the reviews before I signed up i have to say I would have avoided Heart Internet. I guess my affection for Suzi Perry of The Gadget Show clouded my judgment!
Another thing I dd before signing up with WebhostUK was to install YSlow, an extension for Firefox. This allows you to check how fast a site loads and so gives an indication of any issues there might be, with a detailed analysis available for things like JavaScript and style sheets. Bearing in mind that Google places a great deal of emphasis now on how quickly sites load, you want your site to be on a fast server. Interestingly, when you check the default page for Heart Internet it scores 80% (Grade B) but my site hosted by them scored only @ 60% (Grade E). However, now it scores 79% (Grade C).
Finally, I have to say that the staff at WebhostUK have been amazing and extremely helpful. They even send you the transcript of any chat you have with them by email! Also, setting up and configuring your VPS is more complicated than setting up a normal reseller account and so I needed to ask lots of questions. Each time they responded quickly and were very helpful so I can't fault their customer service.
I future posts I'll go through in more detail my experience of setting up my VPS and share any tips along the way. In the meantime, if you are interested in checking out WebhostUk and their services, why not pop along to
