Running a hosting company for quite a few years now, I know what to host and what not to host. And, I guess i can tell most of the times if a site is a legitimate site, or a money making site, or an out right scamming site just by having a look at it.

When you run a hosting company that is fully automated, where visitors come by themselves, purchase hosting on your site, make the payment and the account gets activated, and they start using it, you dont have any work to do there. And you have plenty of time. You could do well to utilize this time to review the various sites that are hosted on your servers. What they have in the front end and what they have behind the scenes.

Most of the times, the datacentre, or the ISP will send you alerts if there are any malicious activities going on on any of the sites on your server, and all you need to do would be to suspend the hosting and the domain. But at times, somethings might go terribly wrong that the ISPs take your server offline by detatching the IP before they approach you. So it is always better to monitor the server yourself, or employ someone who would be good at it.

List of contents that shouldn’t be on your servers.

1. Porn.

2. Unrecognized software sales

3. Un Conformed or unregistered Shopping Sites.

4. Pages that look like any bank, payment gateway, or pages that collect personal information of any sort.

5. Sites that send out a lot of email.

Why?

Contd…….

If you choose to offer shared hosting from a web server that you own or have rented, you need to think twice, and primarily have the operating system on the server in mind. There are various distributions of Linux such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOs, Red Hat, FreeBSD etc that you could use in the linux or unix like platforms. This is one part, and the other is Our Very Own Bill Gate’s Creation, the Crappy Old Microsoft’s Windows NT (Doesn’t)Work Station based Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server Edition.

Fortunately, unlike the PC market, Linux domainates the server industry completely. Nearly 85% of all web servers run on linux. Server Admins like linux since it is trouble free, is a lot stable, wont crash like windows does, is a lot secure, and is a lot efficient. But still, Microsoft Enthusiasts who wish to make their websites only with ASP and MSSQL server, should opt only for windows, since Linux doesnt really support it.

Linux is the best server operating system. There is Solaris ofcourse, and there are mainframes, but when it comes to shared web hosting on 32 or 64 bit servers, it is linux that rocks, and not really windows.

But still, a restaurant that serves Chicken should serve toothpicks as well. So, if you run a hosting company, give priority to linux, and keep the number of windows server on your portfolio minimal. The best way to reduce demand for windows hosting is to keep the price of windows packages extremely high. If the price is something like double that of the price you offer linux hosting for, no one would go for windows naturally unless they really need it.

Likewise, the costs for Windows servers are certainly higher than that of linux servers with all those license fees and stuff. You are literally paying Microsoft for the bugs that they have put in their operating systems, and not for any quality that they have put in their work on the Operating System that they have put up for sale.

1. Linux servers dont need defragmentation. Windows needs that every week, and when your server runs 24×7, you cant really find time or the resources to do the defrag, and when you are doing that, you will find that the sites that you have hosted on the server are really really slow.

2. Linux doesnt need a virus scanner. Windows needs a minimum of 2 virus scanners running on them to monitor the sites and the files that are being uploaded and downloaded from the sites. This consumes considerable processor and memory resources.

3. Linux servers dont need a restart at all. They can run without restarts for months together without any problems. I havent restarted my server for atleast 4 months If im right. I ofcourse restart the services from the server such as SMTP server POP3, Apache etc from the services management, but have never rebooted the server once in the past 4 months or even more. And I restart my Windows server every day. You will see a downtime of 7 Mins every day if you are following the uptime rating of the sites on the server. There is no other way. The server has to be restarted. The Ram completely craps up the server speed, and restarting the services or any operation doesnt help. Only a full server reboot, that results in a complete shutdown of all sites for 7 minutes would help.

4. The best security feature of Linux is that it comes with all its ports closed by default while being installed. You will have to open a port if you need to use it, and if it remains unused for quite some time, it will automatically get closed. That is the best security feature that Linux has. You cannot hack into a Linux server easily. Windows installs with all ports wide open and inviting, and to close them and monitor them, you need to install port monitoring software, which costs money, and resources.

5. The Linux file system never fails or crashes. Windows File System can fail at any time. Linux file systems are very easy on the hard drives, and work hard to keep the drives cool and give longer life to them and keep your data safe. Windows tortures the hard drives just as Hitler tortured the Jews. You can test this yourself on your local PC, install LInux and listen to the sounds that the hard disk produces during normal operation, and chekc the same after installing Windows. You can literally hear it screaming.

6. Linux is a trillion times better when it comes to parallel processing than Windows. So on a server that is shared between clients, everyone would be using a part of the resources, and the resource allocation is a lot simpler in Linux than in Windows, and therefore, the load on the processor is lesser, and you get better results on the performance.

7. There is nothing much that you cannot do on a Linux server thru SSH, and on Windows, you cant do a thing with the Console that they provide, and most of the time you will need to get on to the remote desktop to run command Line instructions.

8. Linux is best for mails. Everything is free and open source. Just install linux on your server and install Exim, and your mail server is ready. In windows, you can go for the free Mail Enable, which sucks completely, or you can pay that huge license fee and get a Microsoft Exchange Server License, which is, by default, filled with bugs as always.

9. Linux is perfect for file server and ftp server requirements. It can manage any number of hard drives connected to the server with ease, and with absolutely no struggle. Windows suffers a lot in managing 2 hard drives parallely. Though they say Windows 2008 does support large number of Hard Drives, I still think it cannot match Linux. Then again, distribution of multiple files on the ftp server to multiple clients can be handled well only by Linux, and Windows wont do that at all. It will struggle and it will make the server struggle.

10. Linux supports PHP, CGI, Perl etc, while windows supports all these ad ASP and MSSQL. People done really realize that these software released by Microsoft are full of bugs, and most of them are intentionally placed. SQL is the same everywhere. MySql is free, and it doesnt mean that it is insecure, and just because MSSQL comes with an expensive license means that it is secure. Banks and other people who are serious about their data never go for MSSQL. They go straight to Oracle. So who does need MSSQL? No one really. Microsoft is just a company that produces software that really should be banned. There are better software in Open Source. And people who really dont understand this go for ASP and MSSQL, while they dont realize that PHP can do better than these.

Got bored with hosting? Not reaching your targets? Think you could as well be doing something else? But worried that you are committed to your clients for atleast another year and that your current bank balance will not let you run the servers for another year without any new sales, and sales will increase the term of your commitment?

Sell your company. Waaaat? Sell my company? I spent days and nights together in building up the brand and the client base. My clients know me induvidually. How do I sell my company? How would I make sure that the buyer treats my clients well? How do I make sure that the clients dont miss me?

No big deal. Selling a hosting company is not like selling a Jaguar. If you dont do it in the scale of Hostgator, Dream Host or others, you shouldnt have tooo many clients. Because, if you had tooo many clients, you wouldnt get bored and wouldnt want to look for something else right? Well, lets Imaging you have about 10,000 clients till date. All happy clients, but unfortunately, you did some overselling, and they are all costing you too much now, and you are planning to sell of the whole thing before you get into a loss.

In that case, look for some other company that is in your same scale. About the same number of clients, about the same number of sites, and about the same page rank as yours. Dont even go near the bigger companies with an offer, and they will eat you up and you would get nothing in return. Approach them and negotiate the cost per client that you expect in the sale. You have put in effort and money to bring those clients in and use your servers right? They are worth money to you no matter how close they are to you and how you have been like brothers or sisters.

Once the negotiation is done, just hand over the servers to them, close down everything, and ask them to take care of the bills, collect your money, and walk away. After about a month, mail all your clients thru a mailing list, and tell them all GoodBye, and that a new management has been running the company for the past 3 months.
Reading this, the clients would be pleased and would certainly continue happily if they had not faced any problems during the transition. If they had, and if you send out a mail, there is going to be trouble.

Never tell your clients before hand that you are about sell your company away, and that would start the reduction in the number of people who would contact you for renewals r anything at all, and that would redue your cost per client.

Or, if you think that your company doesnt have any money, and that if you stop now the clients who have paid you might get affected, you immeidately need to contact those bigger fishes, and ask them to take over the clients. They have a stanard rate of $10 per client, so if you have about 1000 clients, you get $10000 out of it, but your brand will be totally gone, and youwill not be allowed to use that in the future.

Linux, especially ubuntu, is the best operating system that you could install in your computers at your office if you are running a hosting company. No point in getting Windows, paying for the license, getting bugged, and get it resulted in a weak server maintenance or admin work done.

For Windows servers, naturally, you use the remote desktop. Use the terminal services client, enter your servers IP, and a window opens asking for the username and password, enter that and you are logged into the remote desktop of your windows server. Do you find it not as good as the remote desktop client on your windows PC?

Here we go. Terminal services Clinet is a lot stable than windows remote desktop client. It never gets hanged, or refuses to come out of the remote desktop, leaving you in the middle, and forcing you to log out of the administrator and cancelling all your running applications on the server. You can always close the window to exit and log back in to the same session. Yes, windows remote desktop client is designed to do the same too, but it doesnt work very well. I have seen that myself.

And to connect to your linux servers, though there is putty for linux as well, you dont really need it except if you want to run any command or execute anything. For basic file operations, you could directly connect to the file system with ubuntu and do any file operations as required. With putty, you cannot transfer files from local machine or vice versa. Or maybe I have not come across the command for that.

You can stay connected to linux servers with your linux computers for days and months together if your internet connection or power supply for your local machine doesnt give you away, and you will find that it is completely stable, and not like windows which, as the world knows, will not run for more than 24 hours at a streatch.