Web Hosting Issues and How to Deal with Them

hosting issuesLike any other business, the Web hosting industry is faced with issues that happen mostly due to the lack of a reliable and feasible business plan, or sometimes problems of implementing these plans. What some Web hosting providers do not realize is that they tend to lose more due to many customers opting out from their contracts. Another thing that these new Web hosting providers do not realize at first is that user reviews can largely affect the failure or success of any business.

Reselling Web hosting plans can be unpredictable and at times, issues are inevitable like limits or caps on bandwidth. This is one of the main issues that you must learn to tackle, especially for customers with varying bandwidth requirements. In general, if you have a reseller or maybe a VPS account, you may want to consider a plan upgrade or more likely, a switch to a dedicated type of hosting to accommodate the needs of your own customers. If there are certain constraints and would like to build up the business from something else, then the main key is to be prepared.

When you want to invest on increased bandwidth, prepare for a usual downtime by planning on a back up. Downtimes happen with an upgrade in bandwidth because the process may require the server to be turned off at a certain period. Therefore, a back up would ensure a smooth transition and a far less number of frustrated customers. Another issue that may come up concerning bandwidth would be your customer’s need to upgrade it at any point in time. Again, an upgrade of your own bandwidth may more or less accommodate the client’s requirement, and pooling your resources together would give you a great deal of help.

Now, that part of the plan is just to provide a quick fix to bandwidth issues. What you and your customers would like is a plan that works for the long term. Planning for the long term means a massive upgrade that could most likely cost a lot of money. With a good strategy, the amount of money that you invest in your reseller Web hosting plan may actually earn you more in the long term. Again, massive upgrades involve a lot of network integration processes and implementing many infrastructure expansion systems, making you and your customer vulnerable to downtimes. Be sure to have a back up plan to avoid this. Also:

This doesn’t mean you should plan for the next 5 years or more with your Web hosting reseller business. In reality, this would just be impractical compared to regularly monitoring the benefits your customers get from your reseller hosting services. Divide the plan for each fiscal year for the next 5 years. Your plan will have a little bit of flexibility in case of changes to trends in the industry that you would like to implement, like a zero rate downtime if customers would like to upgrade.

Set a goal like a software upgrade for the second fiscal year, which is still realistic and flexible. This helps you avoid getting surprised with changes that you really don’t have control over, since you can prepare for these inevitable or sudden changes. For each fiscal year, you may also want to increase storage space, and whatever amount of additional revenue you earned can be accommodated for this increase.

If you think about it, you are saving more money by doing this, than shelling out a large sum at once if you’re beginning to run out of storage space. What should also be included in the plan is to maintain a team that would constantly provide both customer and technical support to your clients. This is a crucial aspect of the hosting business that you don’t want to overlook. Even if you have a reliable uptime guarantee or secure data storage features, if your customers experience bad email and phone support services, then all the money you invested in those upgrades could be useless.

If you have a small team comprised of experts in Web hosting, Web development and Web application programming, make sure to have a back up of experts that can assist your customers just in case someone in the team would not be able to work due to emergencies and the like. Another solution to this issue of having limited customer service staff is to implement a 24-hour automated chat support system that can provide solutions to common issues with the customer only needing to enter a question in a section of your website. These recommendations can give you increased customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as more potential business for you from customer referrals.

If you have a reseller account from a reliable web hosting provider, make sure that you also have back up resources. If permitted, you can source from one or more other providers. It should be noted that your customers, with you as a reseller, should know that you are selling from a main source with the required high-end infrastructure. This would be the first thing you want them to realize, especially in unfavorable situations like downtimes. This alone would prompt your customers to contact your main Web hosting provider instead of you and your customer service staff, since they already know it isn’t your fault, but rather certain management issues in your main Web hosting provider.

In addition, you should at least equip yourself with much technical knowledge about Web hosting and Web development or even Web application programming. There are plenty of documentation materials available to you via your main Web hosting provider’s website. If you think you cannot be equipped with that much knowledge though would still like to proceed on the business, make this possible by targeting website owners with minimal technical demands. You may opt to host static web pages that require simpler programming software, blog with a little less visitor traffic estimates and sites with a small number of application content. Just like in SEO where a website needs to prove to Google and to other search engines its relevance before it can land top rankings for search terms related to its content, products and services, a Web hosting business ought to prove its worth to its customers on the get-go.

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