One of the most lucrative businesses online these days is web hosting. On the face of it, it seems very easy to launch into this business, but as you go along, things can get pretty complex. So, it’s best to bear a few essential points in mind before setting up your own web hosting company.

Quite obviously, the first point to bear in mind is to get your site up and running. For this, you would need a template, a few pages on the nature of your business, your products and services and future plans. After this, configure a program that will help you receive your customer’s web hosting order.

Next comes the most challenging part of setting up your web hosting company – selling the service. This is a very competitive market, so it’s important that you hit out to as many people as possible.  Plus, you need to sell your service reasonably. To be successful, you need to develop a marketing plan that keeps you ahead of the challenger.

With the above in place, you now need to establish customer support – a big component in your line of business. Your customers are going to need technical support at any time, so make it available 24×7. If you default here, your clients will find other service providers. If you have clients with very large websites, as the web hosting company, you will need to offer dedicated web hosting services. Obviously, this is because their need is far above the limit of shared hosting services. Once you give them dedicated services, their speeds will gallop and they will want to remain as your clients.

Having said that, you must realize that there are some challenges that accompany dedicated servers. Dedicated servers call for time, expense and maintenance, which is naturally much more than what a shared server would make you incur. Before you get your first client, you need to create a welcome email. This should include a confirmation of your client’s specific plan inside information, a user name and temporary password, any DNS/registrar changes, a link to the control panel, instant access to e-mail and FTP and links to the FAQ section and Helpdesk.

Now, it’s time to install billing software so that your prospective web hosting clients can place their orders and renew it easily. Mesh your payment gateways with this software so that you can accept payments made by credit card. To put a good payment gateway into place, sign up for a merchant account.

Once you have the above in place, you’re ready to start your own web hosting company. Before taking the plunge, look at all aspects of the business and ensure that you have the time it requires to run your web hosting business and to provide good customer service.

We all dread this happening to us, but your website has just suffered from some form of disaster and you need to restore your website using the trusty website backup you regularly keep for just such a time (you do keep backups of your website don’t you?).

There are many reasons you might have suffered this fate. Hackers could have got to your website. Or your web hosting provider has had a hard drive failure and lost your account and don’t have backups of their own (don’t laugh, there are lots of web hosts that don’t keep backups).

Let’s assume then that you have been proactive with your online business and actively take website backups and have one or more sitting on your drive just in case you might one day need it.

If you run your website under a cPanel hosting control panel (most hosting providers use this software to manage their servers) then you are in fortunate, because the process is relatively straight forward.

Make sure you use the ‘home directory backup’ option not the ‘full backup’ option that you can download from your cPanel control panel.

The ‘full backup’ option is mainly for your hosting provider to recover your account and doesn’t really help you if you just need to restore selected files. Also only your hosting provider can restore a ‘full backup’.

I highly recommend that you use the ‘home directory backup’ option, since it gathers up all your emails, files, statistics, everything you need, and you can restore it on your own. Also make sure you have downloaded your databases separately alongside your home directory backup. Your databases (if you have any) are just as, if not more important than your website files.

Assuming that you are armed with your files and data, you can do a complete home directory restore using the cPanel control panel, or you can extract the files that you need and just recover those (I’ll discuss that method in detail in another article). Also if your database is the only part of your website that has suffered and needs to be restored, just focus on that.

Here’s the process to restore your whole website and / or database(s)…

a) In your web browser URL enter domain dot com:2082 or domain dot com/cpanel and enter in your login credentials. (replace domain dot com with your website of course)

b) Go to the Backup icon (will look different depending on your cPanel theme)

c) You will see the restore fields on the page for a home directory or your databases.

d) These allow you to browse through your harddrive to find website backup files (in this filename format backup-domain.com-MM-DD-YYYY.tar.gz ). Select the filename and upload it.

Large backup files will of course take longer to upload than smaller ones.

Once the file is uploaded, the cPanel control panel takes over and restores your files and / or databases. It really is a simple process.

Of course if your hosting provider was to blame for your website needing to be restored from your backup copy and not their backup copy and you wish to change hosting providers (I would), you can simply signup with another provider that uses cPanel and once your account has been created you can do a home directory restore into the new account.

Do the same restore process for your databases and you should be back in business in no time flat.

Want to know more about automating your website backups? I would like to invite you to get FREE Instant Access to a 7 day trial of Backup Smart, a cPanel website backup software takes care of your backups so that you don’t have to. Runs on Windows and MAC OSX. Visit http://www.backup-smart.com

Many people want to get their websites up on the web straight away so that they can show it off to everyone and this is quite understandable. However if you are too eager in launching your website, this could have a negative effect on the future success of your website. That is the reason why checking that your website is ready is a good idea before you even think of looking for a web host.

What do we mean by ready for web hosting?

Visitors should find something of interest on your website even if it is not completely ready. And don’t forget that it is expensive to pay for web hosting so you should be making sure that you are getting the full use of it. More than this though, you want to make sure that you don’t lose visitors even before you started. The fact is that if people turn up at your website and it looks a mess or has nothing to offer they probably won’t ever come back again.

How to ensure your site is ready for web hosting

As we said already, your website doesn’t have to be perfect from day one but you do need to have something to offer. You will need to have a long hard think about this. It will more than likely take you longer to plan and prepare your site if you are thinking of making it into a business. And if you do not want your site to look amateurish, then this is even more important.

Try to think about the things you would want from the website if you were visiting it. Imagine if you wanted to visit a website on books. You would probably be expecting to see some book cover images and to see some reviews. Even if your site only has one or two articles and a couple of photos, this is better than nothing at all.

Anybody thinking about venturing into internet marketing should have UK web hosting dealt with beforehand. But the world of web hosting can be confusing. An example of this could be coming across reseller web hosting or even linux web hosting while searching different options.

To the uninitiated , website hosting can seem a bit daunting. There are so many web hosts available all with many packages on offer . Finally there is all the technical mumbo jumbo which the majority of folks will not understand , so what’s the best way of choosing a quality web hosting solution that will be reliable and satisfy your requirements ?

Well you have to decide your plans for your website in the short term and in the longer term and also consider how serious a web master you really want to be. This means that you need to decide whether you will just develop and operate one website or will you get bitten by the bug , as a lot of people do, and desire to have many domains and websites . What is the main function of your website ? Will you be merchandising products or services from it and therefore need a merchant solution ? Will your site require a database to keep product and client data ? How much disk space will you require – if you will be using videos or similarly large files then you will need a lot of space . How many visitors are you expecting ? Do you expect that your marketing campaign will draw a high level of visitors meaning that you will need a high bandwidth requirement every month ?

If you need help with a few of these questions then you can get this from the Internet or alternatively someone you know or a business acquaitance who knows what they are talking about . It will then be possible to liken the different hosting packages that are on offer . When comparing hosting companies , take note of two very important points :

1. How long has the company been in business ? You do not want to trust your website to an outfit that started out in the hosting business last week .

2. What level of support is provided ? Always go for 24 hour 365 days a year support that will respond quickly to any issues you may have and that are helpful and friendly towards you now and in the future .

Shared web hosting will provide the most affordable web hosting for newcomers to launching a website . With this type of hosting you are given a portion of the resources of a web server . You will be provided with an agreed allocation of hard drive space for your web site files and you will share the server’s memory, CPU and Internet bandwidth with others who have shared hosting on the same server . These days there are some amazing shared hosting packages available offering huge web space and monthly bandwidth .

In the longer term if your site really develops and grows you will probably need to upgrade your existing account to a virtual server or dedicated server basis . This will mean that this server is totally under your control and not shared with anyone else . This will cost a fair bit more but it is likely to be a preferable option compared to purchasing servers and an Internet backbone connection . A good hosting company will ensure that this kind of upgrade will be carried out professionally and efficiently so that your site does not suffer any downtime .