Josh Russell

I’m almost up to the point where I’m hosting 100 domains and associated sites and email for friends, small businesses and my own projects. It’s a nice thing to be able to do for people. Most non-nerds would have real trouble organising all the things that need to be done to get to the point of having your own website and email address.

Trouble and Process

As well as finding the people or companies to work with, these are the some of the major required steps:

• Think of a domain name
• Register the domain name
• Understand the desired results from the site
• Work out what scale and functionality is needed from the host and server
• Build the site, upload the site, test the site, market the site
• Make the site appear in search engines (SEO)
• Keep the site updated
• Setup mailboxes or forwarding

Most people would not realise there can be so many steps, and this could be quite a daunting list of things to do!

The types of small businesses and individuals that I’ve dealt with over the last 10 years have simple needs, and don’t want to understand all the things they have to do.

One of things that I’ve found that makes life easier for people is to have a single point of contact for every aspect of setting up a website. With the usual exception of the designer or programmer. It can be complicated to communicate between host, registrar and designer without knowing the terminology. It’s easy to be given the run-around, or in extreme cases be taken advantage of. But the main thing is that the buck is often passed when something goes wrong. Obviously this is just frustrating for people that are engaged in something they don’t have experience with.

The Solutions

Most sites I’ve hosted, share some common technical specifications and business objectives:

• They have their own domain name, usually a .com or .co.uk
• All email needs to come to only one or two people, but there will often be several email addresses in use
• Because budgets are low, updates should be possible without a designer, so a simple method for this should be provided
• Bandwidth and disk space doesn’t need to be huge
• Ecommerce is not needed or wanted, usually the site is used simply for communication to customers
• One bill for all services

My Approach

• I don’t own my own server
• I don’t host email (usually advising to get a webmail account such as GMail)
• I don’t support Cold Fusion, ASP, FrontPage, .Net or Java. In fact I only support PHP/SQL
• I handle domain registration, site setup, and any questions personally

Being only one person i have chosen not to have my own servers or even to rent my own server, instead letting someone else deal with that. I don’t allow or support some technologies or any email boxes because I’m keeping things simple.

So by keeping my life simple and cheap, I am also keeping other peoples life simple and cheap. My model is many-cheap-simple rather than few-expensive-complicated. It’s easier to say too.

The Tech

I buy shared, managed hosting from three different hosts, two in America, one in the UK.

The servers are all currently Dual Intel P4, with 1Gb Memory and enough fast storage for expansion. No server is used by more than 10 people. Backups are done nightly. I monitor traffic, discs, and performance and any issues with the hosts are dealt with by me.

A Plesk control panel is available for people who want to manage their own databases or email forwarding.

Conclusion

As well as providing a simple hosting package, I’m the person that takes the calls and emails when people have a question.

People don’t want loads of stuff they will never need, they don’t want to spend their own time having to organise something they don’t understand. They want VFM, Value For Money. A bill that includes everything and doesn’t change. And they need someone helping them that understands what they want.

When we’re talking about amounts of money that are small, you can’t give somebody the earth, but you can give them what they need.

So that’s my model, what’s yours?