Web Hosting Blog

Choosing a South African Web Hosting Company

Posted by Jaco on July 27th, 2008

So now that you have the website you having trouble deciding where to put it? It is good to make an informed choice the first time, because moving to another web hosting company will cost you time and money. You may also lose some of your valued customers due to the downtime commonly encountered when transferring to another web hosting company.

Below is what I consider to be the most important factors when choosing a South African web hosting company:

Quality of Support and Service

Look at the quality of the web hosting companies existing clients. Ask the web hosting company for a list of large clients that are currently using their services. In South Africa there are many small web hosting companies (not always a bad thing), thus establishing credibility is a good place to start.

Ask for the opinions of existing clients. Testimonials can be a good indication of reliability and support quality. Do not however rely on online testimonials only. Put in the extra effort and contact these clients personally.

Check the time period for which the web hosting company has been in business. Small startups usually fail within the first 2-3 years of business. If your chosen web hosting company has been around for longer than that, chances are they will be here to stay.

You must be able to contact your web hosting company 24/7/365 by phone or email. In South Africa many web hosting companies choose to only provide phone and email support within office hours. Stay away from these companies. The Internet doesn’t sleep and you should be able to contact you web hosting company when you wish. Test the quality and efficiency of their response by sending them an email pertaining to some question you may have before you sign up.

Adequate and Affordable Bandwidth

Bandwidth availabilty is arguably the most important factor to consider when choosing a web hosting company based in South Africa. Local bandwidth costs are among the highest in the world and the situation does not look to be changing anytime soon. Make sure you choosing a web hosting company that provides you with enough bandwidth at a fixed fee. To pay for over usage in South Africa is a danagerous thing. It may cost you up to R2.00+ per megabyte.

Some local web hosting companies choose to only host your website internationally and this will lead to great savings in bandwidth costs. You still however retain the benefits of localised support.

Speed and Reliability

Make sure they have a high-speed connection to the Internet. Depending on whether your target audience is located, locally (in South Africa) or internationally you may want to check where their servers are hosted.

Frequent System Backups

Good web hosting companies will frequently backup your data and store these backups for you at no additional charge. You will however be looking at paying a fee when asking for a restoration of your data.

Compatibility of Features

Ensure your new web hosting provider is compatible with your existing software and skills. In other words, if you are using Microsoft FrontPage to create your website, you should ensure your web hosting company has FrontPage extensions installed on their servers.

Tags: web hosting
Posted in Lusion AHS | 1 Comment »

South African Reseller Hosting: Earning a Passive Income

Posted by Jaco on July 18th, 2008

At Lusion Technologies we recently decided to redevelop our entire reseller system. Previously we made use of the same reseller scheme most large (bulk) hosting companies follow. Bandwidth and space allocation with or without overselling and managed via WHM (Web Host Manager).

With this scheme the reseller could create his own hosting packages and new cPanel accounts . This is a great way of reselling and earning that illusive passive income, but it has some inherent limitations and flaws. It most importantly limits the amount of money you can earn as a reseller host and increases your workload as you host more and more clients (so much for the passive in “passive income”):

1. Most reseller hosting companies provide the reseller with a control panel, bandwidth and space, thats where it ends. There is no reseller hosting automation included in the deal. Resellers are left to find their own billing management system, to suspend and unsuspend their own clients and to register domains manually. Resellers are left without automated domain checks and signup forms, not much use being without those if you want to run your own hosting company.
2. You only have a set amount of space and bandwidth to work with. Once this limit is reached you will have to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade again, constantly paying more and moving your clients around.
3. You will have to provide support to your clients or get some cheap Indian company doing a lousy job for you. With that said if you go with the free support by some 3rd party support provider aka cheap Indian company you may aswell tell all your clients your suport will be almost non-existant. The levels of support these companies provide are shocking. This support is also not localised and you can expect to have a degree in rocket science to understand their engrish.
4. You are given no indication of what to offer in your hosting packages. Certain packages will always just work while others do not attract new clients. Setting up random packages will not lead to an influx of new paying subscribers and that large passive income you have always dreamed of.

Our new reseller hosting system was created to eliminate all the limitations and flaws of “traditional” reseller hosting and allows you to earn while we do all the work. This is how our new reseller hosting system solves the limitations and flaws of “traditional” reseller hosting:

1. With our reseller hosting system there is no limit to the bandwidth and space you can make use of since every new client receives their own package (provided by us). You are given a 20% discount on all our packages and allowed to set their pricing for your clients to anything you wish. You can therefore dictate your own passive earnings and profit margin.
We do EVERYTHING else. Lusion Technologies will:

• Provide you with an automated signup form and the ability to do domain checking. We automatically create new hosting accounts on the sever for your client. There is no work involved from your side.

• Handle the billing of all your clients automatically with their own prices, set by yourself, branded invoices and ability to bill in any currency. When a client pays you will you mark them off in your own reseller managment panel and only then will Lusion Technologies bill you for the amount due to us. You will never be expected to pay unless your client does. This guarentees your profit. We will even send your client an automatic welcome email branded to your business containing all their login information and some help on getting started.

• If your client has requested a domain name, this registration is done automatically for you. You may also set your own domain name pricing and cash in without doing any physical work.

• When a client does not pay (or you do not mark them as paid) we send out warning emails branded to your reseller hosting company and manage account suspensions and unsuspensions for you.

2. There is no limit to the amount of clients you may host on our system. You will never have to move your hosting clients ever again. Expansion and earning potiential becomes limitless.
3. Lusion Technologies will provide all support to your clients branded as your company. Nobody needs to know your are not handling your own support. We will provide free 24/7/365 localised (South African) email hosting support in both Afrikaans and English.
4. With our system you resell hosting packages formulated by Lusion Technologies to provide you with the best possible returns and chance of growing your reseller hosting business. Our Dawn and Shift packages are what we have found to be the best startup and professional hosting packages respectively. This is based on our vast experience in the South African hosting industry. We work personally with each reseller hosting client and are open to suggestions and negotiations regarding custom package offerings.

I could go on forever about all the features our new reseller hosting system offers you, but this could end up being a book on its own. Bottom line, Lusion Technologies provides the most fully featured and comprehensive reseller hosting system available anywhere.

You can find some more information regarding how our reseller system works here. If you have any comments or queries please contact us and we can discuss how our system will assist your business in providing a professional hosting service and earning the amazing passive income you have always dreamed of.

Tags: reseller hosting
Posted in Lusion AHS | No Comments »