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.

Wikipedia

Some people might not realize it – but you can go from article to article and get consumed with Wikipedia quite easily. Before you know it hours have passed.

Cheezburger type sites

These sites are just funny to look at, though I usually get bored after about 20 minutes of looking at these.

Youtube

Everyone knows youtube – it can be a huge time waster, even worse than TV at times.

Netflix

Of course, then comes Netflix, where you can watch TV and movies online. That’s an easy couple hours down the drain.

Video Games

Now, this depends on if you have a powerful PC or not to play the “top of the line” games or if you just want to play flash games and the like. There’s more and more graphically advanced browser based games coming out these days as well. Anyway, you can spend quite some time playing these, especially if they’re MMORPG games, some people spend entire DAYS playing these.

Hulu or Hulu Plus

Watch TV shows and movies on Hulu for free or with your Hulu Plus subscription.

Online Chat

If all else fails, I’m sure people can keep you company while you’re bored on one of the many IRC chat channels. Either that or troll around image boards and forums.

My “last stop” is places like reddit, facebook, and others when I absolutely can’t find anything else to do.

The protocol hasn’t changed since 1986. Originally, the protocol was based on UUCP.

If you’re more interested in what Usenet can do for you, check out my guide to binaries.

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…

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.

You’d think they’d have this under control by now at least to some degree, but it appears that manufacturing links with tools such as xrumer and senuke still works wonders for the autobloggers out there.

Well, I’m still sick of it. I’d like to see some more progress on their end, they’re making enough money to do SOMETHING about it. I mean yandex usually has cleaner results, and in my opinion at least, yahoo should’ve tried to get yandex’s search results instead of bing’s, which are generally poorer than google’s.

Anyway, let’s hope the search giant does something to clean the mess up.

Well, FedEx came and left me a note I don’t know how long ago, must have been a month or two ago. I called them, as stated on the card to come and redeliver it. They never contacted me back, and guess what, they shipped it back to eBay. Months later I got a message from the eBay “member” that sold me the gift for $1. They were going to re-ship it, I had complained to them about it before, but just now finally got a response. I was around to sign for it this time, and got the wallet. So, even if they did take months to reship it, I did receive the wallet

Now to figure out what I’m going to do with it. Perhaps I’ll send it back to eBay Really, what am I going to do with a $100 wallet.

Click to enlarge the thumbnails.

Forum

Discussion

Yep.

You’ll find that with me, I often take things to an extreme level and I’m not satisfied with people doing things for me. Before I launched this website, I had no previous knowledge of how servers worked. I get curious, and I do things, kind of like a kid. I wanted to know what it was like to manage my own server, without having to pay the high costs associated with dedicated servers.

What have I been doing? I’ve been playing with VPS technology for quite some time now. Now that I have finally set everything up, and learned quite a bit, I would not recommend an unmanaged, no control panel VPS to the average user. Why? Well it’s really not that easy to setup if you don’t know what you’re doing. Especially if you have no Linux knowledge, it might seem downright impossible. I did have past Linux experience, but this did not excuse me from screwing up.

Still, I did not do everything manually. ISPConfig is helping me out with the Bind9 configuration files, FTP, website statistics, e-mail, SSL, etc. ISPConfig isn’t easy to setup in the first place if you’re not familiar with all of the programs it comes with, there is quite a bit of manual configuration that needs to be done *before* you compile ISPConfig. Also, try to not install other control panels before ISPConfig as this WILL cause you problems. Other control panels play with configuration files on all the host essential programs. What’s that mean? Well, when you go in and install ISPConfig after having a previous control panel, some configuration files are messed up, and the program will not work with ISPConfig. My e-mail was screwed up because of this.

Yesterday the site was basically down. Why?

Apache and MySQL seem to think you have unlimited resources, they allocate way more than what you actually need. This caused MySQL to crash, thus causing the database error you may or may not have seen.

If you have a low memory VPS, or any VPS for that matter, you probably need to go in and edit the apache2.conf. It’s not hard to find the values that need to be modified, google it. Next, you’ll want to configure MySQL as well to allocate less resources, it really doesn’t need that much. Again, just google this as well, there are plenty of articles about this. If you’re lazy and don’t know how to use google, here’s an article that basically shows what you need to modify for MySQL and Apache.

These modifications made my server go from crashing constantly, to having plenty of free memory. I don’t know what the default values are for, perhaps sites that are getting an unlimited amount of unique hits per day. I think this is  possibly why people complain about VPS performance being worse than shared – they have yet to properly configure everything.

There you have it. I own my host, I have full control to install whatever software I wish. Something I did not have on my shared host. I have a dedicated IP, I have my own name server. I have my own mail server. All of this for only about $60/year. Amazing, huh?

Of course for regular people I believe shared hosting is the best option Either that or get a managed VPS with a control panel.