TechnologyInsanity.com

Ever wonder why the hosting space is so competitive?

Well the thing is – it’s very simple to get started, especially with VPS hosting.

You can buy a VPS from slicehost or some other VPS retailer, get cpanel and break it into segments for your customers. (This can all basically be done for you)

From there all you do is setup a website where you’re going to sell hosting, and promote it online. Most people oversell their VPS/Dedicated servers offering shared hosting because most people that buy the hosting don’t use it much.

If a customer uses too much data they usually get kicked off. This is different with companies such as Hostgator as they can take a few users using tons of bandwidth for their sites because they’re so large, but big consumers will still get kicked from there.

Unlimited in the shared hosting world is never really “unlimited” they just say that to make you feel better and the limits are actually in the TOS for the most part.

So if you want to dive right in – that’s pretty much all you need to do – and most of the shared hosting biz is run around advertising now – so you’ll want someone who can really market the crap out of your website. This is where the real cost comes in – marketing.

Don’t expect to make much without heavy advertising.

So, you want to start a website?

The easiest way to start one is to head on over to blogger, hubpages, or any of the other web 2.0 properties. Why? Well it’s a good starting point before you get into all the craziness with hosting, domains, and setting up php applications on your server.

When you write something on hubpages or blogger, you have a good chance of getting indexed by Google if it’s a decent topic. You don’t need much as far as promotion. When you start a brand new website from scratch on an unknown domain, Google isn’t going to pay attention to your site unless you get some links to it somehow. So, start with web 2.0 and familiarize yourself with html code a little before jumping head first into the world of websites.

So you think you’re ready?

First, you need hosting. Get a shared hosting plan from HostGator. Next you need a domain. Buy one from internet.bs. Why internet.bs? Well GoDaddy, the most known, has tons of upsells and over charges. Go with them if you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, hostgator will give you some nameservers, and you’ll need to point your domain to those servers on internet.bs. That’s a pretty simple task, along with adding your domain into cPanel. Pretty soon the DNS should propagate and you should see a default page on your domain.

From there you should be able to get FTP access by typing in the domain and FTP Port along with your username and password. Once you’re there, you can follow the instructions for wordpress or whatever you’re installing.

Some will need you to setup a mysql database, which is pretty easy through cPanel. Anyway, a lot of this has been automated with most of the php softawre today, so you just input the data as you go along with the web based installer.

Then you’re ready. Ready for what? Ready to customize your site and add content. This will require photoshop skills or you’ll need to hire someone. Along with that, you’ll need links to point to your site so Google will even pick up on what you wrote.

Sound easy? Well that’s why I told you to start with web 2.0 sites first. No matter what, I can’t explain the entire process to you because I don’t know what software you’re installing on the host, or maybe you decided to just upload HTML files to the site with FTP?

To be continued…

Sometimes, web hosting can get very confusing for someone new to hosting. So let’s clear up some of that confusion.

Shared Hosting

This is probably what you’re going to want to start out with, if you’re new to operating Linux systems or don’t know anything about Linux. Most web servers run some form of linux, mainly because windows is rather unstable and more vulnerable to attacks.

So with shared hosting, all you need to do is learn how to use cPanel and the basics of linking a domain and setting up wordpress or some other PHP based software for your site. Either that or just upload your HTML pages with an easy to use software.

Shared hosting is for when you want to get your feet wet with the world of hosting, and generally HostGator is where people start.

VPS Hosting

I’m very much a fan of VPS hosting because I can get a VPS for almost the same cost as shared in some instances, and have full control of my server. This of course isn’t for everyone and low traffic sites are probably better off sticking to shared hosting for awhile. Once you start running bigger numbers or consuming a lot of bandwidth, a VPS is going to be necessary for you.

There’s two types you can choose from:

Managed

Someone else is going to setup all the programs you need to run the website and also install a control panel for you. This will give you a similar experience to your shared hosting plan but you’ll probably have more bandwidth available and you can run whatever programs you want on it.

Unmanaged

I usually go with this just because it really doesn’t take me long to setup a server and maintenance really isn’t that bad, but you’re in total control and you need to be there to fix issues if your server goes down, along with setting all the applications and control panel up. (if you want one.) This is for more experienced users or if you want a bit of a hobby for awhile because it does take awhile to figure everything out. I did it for fun awhile back so I’m familiar with everything on hosts and I also familiarized myself with Linux far more than I ever had in the past within a short time period.

Dedicated Hosting

This is only necessary if your site is gigantic or you’re doing huge ad campaigns of some sort. Generally a VPS can handle pretty large sites or several sites without a problem, of course it does depend on what kind of site it is. If it’s a high traffic site that’s getting a lot of “downloaders” like image sharing, you need dedicated.

This all depends because the VPS options are getting to be more and more powerful and they’re always scalable – generally I prefer the VPS only route – but I’m not running anything huge.

Colocation

You can purchase a spot at a datacenter, build a computer and ship it off to the datacenter. This is called colocation – you own the hardware and just pay for bandwidth and the space your computer takes up in the datacenter.

You can also have managed or unmanaged in this instance, but if you have unmanaged you better be close to the colo facility.

Well, that about covers it, and now you should understand why the hosting space is so competitive. Pretty much anyone can start up a hosting company, and for now at least it seems like the ones with the most exposure or advertisements are winning the battle.

cPanel is a hosting control panel. It’s very popular for it’s ease of use for managing large websites or reselling hosting to customers.

If you’re just buying a shared hosting plan, chances are you’ll get to use cPanel. Think of it as kind of as software you install on your computer, you have microsoft word, but you could run open office instead, or you could just write on the included wordpad in windows.

Hosting control panels are very similar. You have free options and paid options or you don’t need a control panel at all. You can indeed get websites running by editing config files if you really want. cPanel links a bunch of programs that run on servers together so they’re easy to control from a web based GUI. That’s all it really does. This includes apache, ftp programs, mail servers, dns, etc.

If you have your own VPS or dedicated server you can choose to install cPanel on it along with all the applications you need to run a web server or you can get a bare bones server with nothing installed on it, other than maybe the operating system. If you do this I recommend you go with debian. It’s rock solid and easy to install programs through the repositories – in very few instances do you need to build things from source, and even then most of the dependencies can be recovered from the repositories.

Setting up from scratch on other operating systems can be somewhat tricky.

The main control panels include:

• cPanel
• DirectAdmin
• Webmin
• ISPConfig
• Plesk

There’s more than that – but those are the ones I’ve used in the past. Personally, when setting up a server from scratch and going all “free” I use ISPConfig & Debian. ISPConfig isn’t any harder to use than cPanel once you get used to it, though cPanel does have more features. Those generally haven’t been necessary for me, though.