The absolute most commonly used out of all of these is just a regular web hosting account. This type if account is very versatile, and can be used for a myriad of reasons. Often times this is the most cost effective choice for the consumer assuming that they don’t need a large bulk of space for their website. This is often the best choice for personal users and small businesses. This hosting plan will offer you everything you could ever need to start up a web store, email accounts, shopping cart software, and database access.

A reseller hosting account is intended for someone who is interested in starting up a web hosting company of their own with a very low risk. The most you would lose per month assuming you don’t resell any web space at all with a basic plan would be 29.95 through eLief. A reseller host is perfect for an entrepreneur who is looking for a great start in the field. Now although this space is intended for reseller hosting, it doesn’t have to be used for that. Once you’ve purchased the plan you can do whatever you want with the space.

Dedicated servers are for businesses that have become so successful that a normal web hosting account simply isn’t enough. You now need an entire server devoted to your hosting needs. This may just be the kind of plan that you want, but you will need to have knowledge on server administration. Though if your business is large enough to be able to afford a dedicated server, than you will probably have an IT to take care of this for you.

VPS (virtual private server) hosting or virtual dedicated hosting can be thought of as a happy medium between a dedicated server and a regular web hosting account. It gives you the control and flexibility of dedicated Web hosting at a lower cost. You will be technically be sharing the same server with other websites, but that server will be divided into multiple “virtual” private servers. Each VPS runs on it’s own without interfering with the VPS hosting of other websites on the same server. You will have complete administrative control over the VPS software.

If after reading this you’re still having a hard time deciding which type if account is right for you, please never hesitate to contact an eLief representative to talk over what type of account would be suit your hosting needs.

The first thing that you are going to want to do is make sure that your domain, and all of your sub domains link to each other. These are free links for you. It ensures that your website is easy to navigate, and improves your SEO. It would also be a great idea to have an index page. When people do a web search, they obviously aren’t going to type in your domain from the get go. They are going to type in a keyword. That keyword is what you’re going to want to use as anchor text when acquiring links. Let’s say that you offer cPanel. “Cpanel hosting” would be one of your keywords as this is what someone is likely to type in a search engine. Since it’s a higher priority keyword, it’s called a “short tail” key word. If it’s more obscure like, “cPanel Host” or “cPanel Web Hosting”, then it is called a long tail key word. Typically you want to shoot for short tail key words. But if you’re having a hard time ranking up, then you might want to consider some long tail keywords, since less people will be doing SEO for it.

Having one of your keywords in your domain name would be a huge boost for your SEO. So if possible make sure you do that. Don’t think you’re just limited to a .com either. There are plenty of other domain extensions like .pro, .org, .us, .biz, etc… Start up an affiliate program. There are plenty of business on the web that help each other out with their affiliate programs. You link to each other, and share link juice. Just try and make sure that whatever business you choose for an affiliate, has some relevance to your business. It’s okay if it doesn’t, but don’t get into the habit of it as this may hurt your page rank.

Don’t be afraid to start small. Think about it, all you need to do business is a computer, and an internet connection. You can work from almost anywhere. As a reseller host, you have an advantage of not over investing. You know exactly how much money you lose each month even if you start to slack off, so you wont have to make as many gambling decision as your father company does. Start off with shared hosting. It is the easiest form of web hosting that you can sell. Once you feel as though you’ve built up a decent clientele, then it might be a good idea to explore other avenues, like co-located hosting, dedicated servers, or domain registration.

Try your best to get your own server. This should be your ultimate goal, because it is this step that will take you from reseller host, to web host. You will even be able to start selling other people reseller hosting accounts. Even if you can’t afford to buy a server, you can always rent one. Both of these options can be rather expensive, so make sure that you’re successful enough already to make it worth it. Also make sure that you’re equipped with the technical knowledge that it takes to manage servers.

Make sure that you have great customer service. If you feel like you’re not adept in the field enough to answering peoples questions, or maybe you just need some extra help, then don’t hesitate to hire someone to do that for you. Pay them not by the hour, but rather by each question they address. If you can’t hire a professional, look around a college campus. There are plenty of young minds there just waiting to get into the field to gain experience and have something to put down on a resume.

I hope this blog post is helpful to everyone out there that is interested in starting a reseller hosting company. If you have any further questions, or would like me to elaborate more on something that you read, please don’t hesitate to comment. Good luck!

1. Have a Plan – Before you do anything like buying books, it is important to have a set plan as to what you want to do with your business. Things to consider would be what kind of business you want to start, what your goals are, how big you want to be, etc… It will only hurt you if you decide to just jump in head first without any kind of plan. This includes a contingency plan, it might be a good idea for you to remain employed while your starting up your online business. Unfortunately you’re not guaranteed to be successful. It’s important that you make sure you don’t overstep what you can afford for your business sapling. Make sure that whatever money you invest in your business is within your means, and even if you lost every penny you invested in it, that you would still be able to live comfortably. If you want to have a big company and you really feel like you need a large initial investment, then write up a business plan and make it look as professional as you can. Take it to a bank and speak with a representative there. Getting a loan might be just the thing that you need to do to hit the ground running.
2. Web Hosting Services – Once you have a good business plan, and you’re ready to go it’s time to start looking for a web host, and a web developer to get you started. When looking for a good web hosting company, you need to make sure that the one you choose is going to suit your needs. Things to look for are going to be reliability (up-time), speed (which improves your SERP ranking), and if they offer Magento hosting. Magento is the best open source ecommerce platform to date, and it should be used by any online business. Elief offers this free of charge.

3. Acquiring a Tax ID Number – Once you’re just about done with all the preliminary stuff, it’s important for you to get an IRS Tax ID Number. It’s a number for your business that protects you from having to give out your SSN all the time. Another important reason to get this, is because often times other companies wont even do business with you if you don’t have one. You can acquire an IRS Tax ID Number at IRS.gov

4. SEO – Search engine optimization is one of the most important things for an online business to work on. No matter how good your website looks, or how great the products that you sell are. None of it matters if people can’t find you on the internet. Having good SEO means that you will rank higher on the SERP (search engine results page). Your goal should always be to get as close to the number 1 slot on page 1 of the SERP. You do this by acquiring links all over the web. The higher the page rank of the website that you get a link on, the more it will be worth to you. If possible try and get links on pages that are .gov or .edu, as this will yield more authority for your website. If you’re having a hard time figuring out where you should be acquiring links from, visit opensiteexplorer.org. With this website, you can type in the domain name of one of your competitors that ranks higher than you on the SERP and see where they’re getting their links from and try to get a link in the same place, or a similar website.

5. Work Ethic – If you’re lucky, and you business starts to be successful early on, make sure you don’t start slacking. If anything, start working harder! Being somewhat successful opens up doors to you that weren’t available previously. Start looking for affiliates, hire someone to help you out with the more mundane tasks of your business like SEO, so that you can work on more business related tasks.

6. Communication – Keep in contact with your customers. Make sure you give them optimal service, and give them a reason to come back. Stand out as much as you can from the crowd. Make sure that people, especially ones that have done business with you in the past, know about deals and promotions that you may currently be running. When someone does business with you, you should have an email list that people can optionally sign up for to keep contact. Make sure your brand is synonymous with quality, good services, and optimal customer service.

7. Love What You Do – Finally make sure that you go into something you love. What ever it is that your selling, make sure that it isn’t something that you loathe doing, or something that goes against some value or moral that you hold. If you love what you do, then your morale will be high, and you will have the motivation to do well and flourish. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from other people. The internet is an excellent resource for you to use. I hope this post helped all of you out. I wish you all the best of luck in all your endeavors, business or other.

For starters, it is imperative that you make a back up of all your files prior to doing anything in case something goes wrong. You can either perform an export of your database using phpMyAdmin, or you can submit a technical support request so that we can do it for you.

Magento manages several logging tables. These tables make logs of things like which products have been compared, customer accesses and other ancillary logs. Magento has a self cleaning program to clean this out regularly, but this feature is inactive by default, and most consumers wont turn it on. Here are three ways to clean out these tables. You can either access the “Log Cleaning” feature in the Magento Admin, or you could just manually do so via phpMyAdmin.

The tables below are managed by the Magento Log Cleaning function:

log_customer
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_url
log_url_info
log_quote
report_viewed_product_index
report_compared_product_index
report_event
catalog_compare_item

Log Cleaning through the Admin

1. While in the Magento Admin click on System, then click configuration.
2. In the menu on the left under Advanced click System.
3. Where it says “Log Cleaning”, select yes to enable log cleaning, and configure the save your logs for 15 days. Then click save.

Manual Cleaning through phpMyAdmin

This is by far the most effective way to clean the logs for individuals that are more comfortable working with databases. It’s definitely quicker than the Magento tool, and it allows one to clean some of the tables that aren’t included in the Magento tool.

-Open the database in PhpMyAdmin in the cPanel Control Panel

-In the right frame, click on the boxes for the following tables:

dataflow_batch_export
dataflow_batch_import
log_customer
log_quote
log_summary
log_summary_type
log_url
log_url_info
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_visitor_online
report_viewed_product_index
report_compared_product_index
report_event

Look to the bottom of the page, then click the drop down box that says “with selected” and click empty.

A confirmation screen will appear, click yes, and this will truncate all the tables you just selected

Note: It can be very easy to mistakenly delete a database instead of emptying it, you should be very careful and make sure that you are selecting the correct option.

Make sure you perform this regularly. We’ve seen a 3+ gigabyte database drop to less than 100 megabytes after proper log cleaning has been performed. This kind of maintenance is very important for the performance and health of your website and needs to be done periodically.

For an automated method to clean this up regularly, you can setup a cron job by following our instructions on our post about speeding up Magento commerce.

What Makes You so Special?

Most people that are going to be buying web hosting from you are not going to be as technologically savvy as you. So throwing a bunch of stats and numbers at them may fall on deaf ears. Yet you need to tell them things that will make them perceive you as being superior to your competitors. Can you offer 24/7 support? That’s a pretty big deal, and it’s something you’re going to want to mention. Can you offer 99% up time for your servers? It would be a good idea to mention it somewhere on your site. This will show the customers that you are reliable, and they can feel safer getting their service from you. Keep in mind, don’t make any promises you can’t keep. A couple of people with some bad experiences could easily be the demise of your business if word gets out.

What Should Your Prices be?

Pricing may seem like it is one of the harder things to determine, but in reality it’s not. You may be looking at some of the ridiculously low prices that some other web hosts are offering, and cringe in fear, and wonder how they can afford to do so. Often times people that offer web hosting for so cheap, have less than exemplary servers and equipment. Not to mention, people who are looking for crazy deals on the internet for a web hosting service are often times the people who have the least amount of experience and will be constantly harassing you for technical support. Don’t sell yourself short, people are more likely to respect your reseller hosting company if you have a fair and reasonable price around the range of ten to fifteen dollars per month.

Do Your Customers Love you?

This is one of the most important aspects of whether or not you will succeed. Get them excited and proud to use your brand. Give them an excellent experience, and encourage them to want to tell everyone about how great your web hosting company is. Brand recognition is very important, make sure you spend a lot of time thinking of a unique and clever name and logo, and don’t just choose something generic. The more generic your business is, the more you will blend in with everyone else.

In summation, web hosting is a very generic service, and a consumer can be overwhelmed with all the potential web hosts out there. Web hosts are a dime a dozen, and it’s up to you to get noticed. SEO, (search engine optimization) can be your best friend. If you rank high on a search engine like Google, then you have a higher chance of being seen. It doesn’t matter how good your service is, or how many people you have working in your company. If no one notices you, you will not succeed. eLief wishes you all the best of luck out there!

We at eLief offer great reseller hosting accounts to jump start your web hosting business. Feel free to post if you have any questions.

Suppose you would like to start up a web hosting company using a reseller hosting account. You would have to do sufficient research, and purchase all the necessary utilities: a reseller hosting plan with enough resources, web design, billing system (included free on your eLief account), customer support, etc. Completing these first steps gives you a great feeling of accomplishment, since you’re now ready to take the several months of planning and turn your dream into a reality.

The Beginning Stages

This is the part where most hosting companies will fail. After several months, you become so totally absorbed into your new business that you start forgetting about your normal, daily life. When you speak with friends or family, eventually the topic of your business will come up. The first question from them will always be “How’s your business doing?”, and then occasionally “How much money are you making?”

In the early stages, that question will absolutely CRUSH any persons entrepreneurial excitement. This is normal. You’ll need to swallow your pride when you realize that the answer to that question isn’t yet what you would like it to be.

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve now set an invisible goal for yourself. You now believe that in-order to prove to the world that your hosting business is not a failure, you have to show that you have a large profit margin.

You shouldn’t get discouraged if your business isn’t an instant success. Infact, most businesses in general do not usually turn a profit for the first 12-24 months. If you’re counting on being the exception instead of the rule, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Making Money and Building a Business are Two Different Things

This is especially true for startups. The majority of new web hosts invest copious amounts of time into the startup of the business, and then if they don’t see immediate results, they abandon their business with nothing to show except debt and lost time.

Not seeing the profit and cash flow after the first 6-18 months can be a very scary feeling. That feeling is what will drive many startups to give up or sell their business. This is a huge mistake.

Perhaps an analogy will help; My wife recently has been cooking some amazing food with home grown vegetables. Think of the time and effort put into a reseller web hosting company, as the time and effort put into a garden. If you were to plant a seed and water it, fertilize it, and after a few days or weeks you don’t see any vegetables. Would you give up on it so soon? Probably not, because you can see the physical growth and see your plants slowly developing. With a business, it’s the same idea, except not as easy to see, and is on a much grander scale.

My advice to you: Don’t worry about making money in the beginning stages.

Planning ahead is imperative. It would not be wise for you to quit your day job immediately. Make sure that you have a strong business plan, and are financially secured for 6 months at the very least prior to starting out. Work on the business in your off time, and the business will succeed if the right amount of time, planning, and effort is put into it.

Don’t give up and the next time someone asks that dreaded question, your answer will feel much more admirable. Good luck!

–

Look out for the follow-up series of articles coming in the next couple weeks, where we will go into some of the more technical aspects and business strategies specifically related to reseller web hosting, and why an eLief reseller hosting account would be an excellent avenue for you to get started.

#10 Link related posts to Each Other

If you link your articles on your blog to each other they will form a synergy amongst each other that will be easier to navigate for users and search engines alike. Linking directly in the body of your article would be ideal, since that would be the most intuitive way to get someone to expand on something specific that you’re already talking about in your initial article. To add a link, highlight a word with your mouse, and go up to the blog toolbar and click the link button (it’s the one that looks like a chain). Then you can click “link to existing content” and select which article you would like to link to.

A great way to do this without seeming too spammy or forced, is to write a very long post and have it spread out through multiple days or weeks. i.e. ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 1′, ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 2′.

#9 Website Speed

The speed of your website can actually somewhat influence your rankings in Google. For example, if two websites have similar ranking factors then Google could use website speed to determine which site has the higher ranking. It also allows for a better user experience, allowing your visitors to browse through your site quicker.

A great plugin to increase the performance of your WordPress blog is the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches all of your pages and speeds your site up, as well as saving bandwidth usage and server resources in-case you receive a spike in traffic.

If you have FireFox, you can download firebug along with the YSlow plugin, which will analyze your website and give you tips on what you can improve upon.

#8 Coding Your Website Properly Through HTML for Validation

Allow me to preface this tip by saying that it’s for more of and advanced user, someone who has the know-how to code web pages(or the money to pay someone who does!). Yet it is important nonetheless. Making sure that your website is coded properly, and that you’re receiving validation from W3C Validator. If you don’t know how to code but would still like to utilize this tip, you can pay someone to do this for your blog for you at Elance or a similar freelancing site. At this point instead of using one of the free wordpress themes, you could have them design and code your own theme with speed, SEO  and w3c validation in mind.

Duplicate content is a big no-no, so if you are using a freely available theme with thousands of other sites, it could be hurting you, and definitely isn’t helping you.

You also want to make sure that you are using the proper page title length, meta description, and a ton of other variables. A great tool for this that I highly recommend is SEOMoz Pro – it will crawl your site weekly and let you know what needs to be fixed in a well organized, beautiful looking chart.

#7  Optimizing Your Post’s Slug(Page URL)

The slug is what you see after the last slash in the url of the blog. So http://www.yourdomain.com/”slug”/. You can edit this by pushing the edit button just below the title of the post, next to ‘Permalink’. You’re going to want to fill it with a shortened version of your title, that contains keywords that are related to what the blog post is about. Make sure not to use any spaces, but rather separating the words with a hyphen “-”. Personally, when I write blog posts I always try to use a title that other people are searching for in Google. Though, of course, that is not always possible to do.

#6 Create a Sitemap for Your Website

Search engines and users alike, like it when you have an easy to read summary of your entire website. An extremely easy way of going about this would be to install a WordPress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin does all the heavy lifting for you, and will automatically update anytime new content is added.

#5 Optimizing Your Permalinks

This is a matter of making your url go from looking like this http://www.yourdomain.com/?page_id=1 to http://www.yourdomain.com/(whatever title or keyword you want). This is different from slugs, because this can effect what comes after the slash for any of the URLs that pertain to your site. For instance if you had an about page, or a bibliography page, you would want to use this. To utilize this, go to settings on the left, and click Permalinks. Then click custom structure and type in whatever you would like it to show. You can even have it include the date that it was made if you like, using one of the pre-made structures. It is much friendlier for both users and search engines.

#4 Improving Your Images

Having pictures in your posts can be a great way to further illustrate what you are talking about. Search engines are not smart like people and can’t tell the difference between a picture of a lady bug, and the Eiffel tower.  It is this reason that it is important to use keyword rich image titles and alt text to label your picture so that a search engine knows what the picture is. It also can help with searches in ‘Google Images’.

#3 Use keywords in your title

Don’t make your title just some crazy amalgamation of keywords that pertain to your site. That would be bad and is frowned upon by Google, but if you can include a key word or two and it will make your title look good and above all make sense, then go for it.

#2 Create Great Content and Link to Great Content

Bottom line, people wont want to visit your website if your content is garbage, regardless of how much time you invest in SEO. Make sure you have integrity, take your time creating really good well-crafted content. Also if you link to other websites or blog posts that pertain to what you’re talking about, people will be more likely to respect you and possibly the webmasters you’re linking to will return the favor, which will give your site more authority.

#1 Build Back Links to Your Site

Whenever possible, you should be doing this. Anytime you post on a forum, or another blog somewhere, included in your signature or profile should be a link to your site.

You can even contact other websites that have some renown to them, and simply ask if they will create a link to you. A great way to do this is to first publish something with a link to them, and then mention that you have linked to their site and would appreciate a follow-up response or a mention with a link back to your site. Anytime you have an opportunity to plug your site make sure you take it.

With all this preaching, it would be wrong for us not to do it ourselves …

I’m now going to take my own advice and plug eLief. If you like what you’ve read please give us a mention or link back to this post. If you’re a current eLief customer you can always put a link back to us on your site or forum signature, showing off to the world how much you love your web hosting company:

Proudly hosted by eLief <a href="http://www.elief.com/web-hosting.php">Web Hosting Services</a>

After all the html code is processed, it will look like this:

Proudly hosted by eLief Web Hosting Services

Hopefully these tips have helped you out, make sure to comment if you have any questions or anything to add!

When adding your site you can enter the coupon code SAVE20 to take 20% off your order. The offer expires at the end of October so you will want to order before the end of this month.

Some other great directories you can look into are DMOZ and the Yahoo! directory. DMOZ is free to submit your site, but it can take a very long time to be approved. Yahoo! charges $299/year.

Most web hosts include something like AWStats or you can use Google Analytics for advanced visitor tracking, so the logging Magento provides isn’t needed and isn’t very useful.

Why the Magento developers don’t have this disabled by default or cleared out regularly by default is way beyond me. I wish the Magento developers would realize how big of a performance factor this is and focus on increasing performance for us Magento users rather than continue to add more features and slow down the stores.
/end rant.

Enough Already -  Just tell me how to do this!

1.) Download the file cleanup.php and upload it to your main Magento folder. Please note the file you are downloading is zipped so you will need to extract the file before uploading it. You only need to upload cleanup.php.

2.) Next you will need to login to your cPanel to setup a Cron Job. To do this just click on the ‘Cron Jobs’ icon under the Advanced tab in your cPanel account.

3.) Under the ‘Add New Cron Job‘ section select ‘Once a day‘ under the Common Settings drop down. After you have done that copy the following into the Command box:

curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.yourdomain.com/cleanup.php?clean=log

Make sure to change the bolded section of the code to where you uploaded the cleanup.php file to.

After doing so, click the Add New Cron Job button, and your done!

4.) If you would like to go a step further to increase your performance, while still in the cron job section you can add a new cron job to clean your var folder out.

Under Common Settings this time you can select 1st and 15th.

Add the following code to the command line:

curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.yourdomain.com/cleanup.php?clean=var

Again making sure to change the bolded selection to where the cleanup file is located, click Add New Cron Job, and again that cron will be saved and will run every 2 weeks. This one we extended a little farther apart since it doesn’t need to be ran as often.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to let us know under our blog comments section.

Here are 5 easy ways you can instantly clear up hard drive space and reduce the number of inodes on your server:

1.) Remove User Generated cPanel Backups

Many times cPanel users aren’t aware that they should delete a cPanel backup before performing another cPanel backup.  Essentially they are taking backups of backups and this can quite easily add up to several gigabytes of space just for one account. A quick and easy way to remove these is to run the following command from root:

for user in `/bin/ls -A /var/cpanel/users` ; do rm -fv /home/$user/backup-*$user.tar.gz ; done

Make sure to copy the full command exactly how it is above. This will work for cPanel hosting servers only.

2.) Audit your MySQL Databases

Not only will this free up disk space but it can greatly help with increasing the performance on your server. Large MySQL databases on sites that are receiving a large amount of traffic can really slow down a server. Many times the tables that are using the most space in a database are simply from visitor logging or caching, things that can be freed up instantly be truncating the table.

Use the following command when logged in as root to show the highest usage databases on the server:

du -k --max-depth 1 /var/lib/mysql | sort -n

This will show a list of individual databases from lowest to highest. Databases larger than 500mb can be an issue with performance so it is worth it to investigate them.

Once you have the results from the command above, it is easy to go into phpMyAdmin and find the database. Once you have clicked on the database you should sort the table size by space, clicking it twice so that it shows the highest usage table on the top.

If the table is some type of visitor logging or tracking table, it generally is okay to truncate it. The same goes for caching. Make sure to backup the database just in-case before doing so, and it won’t hurt to do a quick google search to see if that table is okay to empty. Searching for the exact term/table name usually will bring up the results you are looking for.

This is a great way to free up disk space, RAM and help increase overall server performance.

3.) Remove Installatron and Fantastico Backups

If you are running Installatron or Fantastico on your server, it is easy for the backups for these files to use up a lot of inodes and space, taking up resources and slowing down performance. Usually once every few months we will remove these for that reason. You can do so by entering the following commands:

For Fantastico:

rm -rfv /home/*/fantastico_backups

For Installatron:

rm -rfv /home/*/.installatron/backups

These are the two software installers I am familiar with, if you are using another software installer the same can be done for it if you just insert the proper location where the backups are stored. Consult with the software developer to make sure it is okay to do so first.

4.) Get Rid of Cached Yum Files

Updates from Yum usually leave some unneeded files on the server. Do some Yum house cleaning:

yum clean all

5.) Delete Failed FTP Uploads

When users are uploading files via pure-ftp and the upload either fails or is interrupted it will leave a partial file on the server. You can quickly get rid of these to clean up some disk space:

locate .pureftpd-upload | xargs rm -fv

Using the above five ways we have sometimes cleared hundreds of Gigabytes of space and doing all of the above should take you less than an hour.

Let us know your results or if you have anything to add.