Avoiding Hosting Company Headaches

I have to admit after years of hosting clients there is nothing worse than a Saturday afternoon telephone spasm. When you have a few hundred shared accounts on a server and that server goes down expect to spend a good amount of time on the phone letting clients know you will have their site up as soon as possible. Emotions will range from angry and frustrated to "hey is our site down, I'm not sure if it's my browser or not?". Years ago I would sweat like a pig for the next 1-6 hours depending on what the problem with the server was. Living in fear like this is not the way to live. At The Atlanta Hosting Company, hosting is not even our bread and butter but it keeps clients under our wing and helps maintain re-occurring business. Finding a good cost effective solution to avoid downtime should not be a hard task but when moving accounts, email and settings over to a new server solution you can expect major problems if you aren’t prepared. When starting out being a reseller is ok but you are putting a great deal of trust into your provider’s hands. If you are spending most of your time being a web design company you definatly don't want to get stuck sitting on hours of support calls.

When I was using a web hosting reseller I ran into one of the hardest longest weeks of my life moving account after account to the hosting solution that is now running our websites today. I knew I needed to get out and I was the largest account this reseller had in the process he did not make this an easy transition for me or my clients. He was completely angry with me for starting to move accounts to these new servers without telling him and in the process things locked up and started to not copy over correctly. There could have been a legal battle there could have been blood, I don't know if I'm just a softy or not but in the last eight years I have not had any legal issues with clients or vendors and I would like to keep it that way. I guess there is a first time for everyone and mine might be coming down the pipe. Now I feel much safer with the way we have setup and organized our hosting process. Don't get me wrong we have had some down time, but when it does happen we have a great off location support team that sits on our servers 24/7.

The learning curve was a little steep and we spent a few long weekends working out billing issues and software conflicts but overall now this company has a piece of mind. If you currently have 50 or more small business clients and maybe a few larger budget clients, I recommend getting your first dedicated server through the planet. The planet is one of the largest hosting providers on the planet and they watch our dedicated servers while we sleep. Getting Cpanel, WHMCS billing and Apache server running was a headache but made a huge difference in the long run.

I have not used many billing systems but I really like WHMCS it integrates into the WHM control panel and allows clients pay their bill, upgrade their service or purchase other products. WHMCS automates reminders, support tickets and even domain renewals. It has many features that can be tweaked to your preferences. Once it is installed you no longer have to use WHM to create your accounts all plans, services and products can be setup from the billing system.

Happy Hosting..