Shared Hosting and MODX

1) Holidays

I have a GPRS data card and laptop which I take with me, along with a pocket PDA which gives me access to the servers, I also have the server monitored by an uptime service company and if any services go down I get calls on my mobile 24’7. Support ticket emails are also delivered to my mobile.

2) Uptime

This year we aiming for 99.9% uptime in 2006 we scored 99.759% uptime, and this year to date 99.866%

http://www.serviceuptime.com/users/uptimemonitoring.php?S=860df414e006ab1089367ba0d714e687&Id=2848

The small outages you see above in the stats are from rebooting the servers out of hours between 12am and 7am, with the outage time being less than a minute.

3) Size

I don’t believe in overselling resources our servers have plenty of bandwidth and disk space currently we only using 150GB of our allocated bandwidth which is 6,000 GB per month, and if we was to reach the bandwidth limits services carry on as normal and I just get a slightly larger bill for the data transfers

Our Disk space each server has 190GB disk space, I worked worked out the maximum number of customers per box which gives enough free disk space in case of over usage, I’m also looking at purchasing two additional servers this year one to run a dedicated Linux Spamassasin service and the 2nd one to increase our capacity.

If a customer ever goes over bandwidth or disk space their website will carry on as normal at the end of the month an email notification will go out about over usage, and if this continues we would contact the customer to discuss their needs and look at adding extra features to their hosting account or upgrade to another package.

4) Selling out to the big boys or going bust.

No way I love my servers I’ve not made a single penny from hosting in the last 4 years its all been reinvested back into the business its something I enjoy doing and it also saves me money having to rent web space.

Aaron.

0ad
You make a VERY valid point.... thank you for "butting in"
Aaron, you’re a great salesman.
I’m almost there.

Mysql? Your hosting packages don’t mention it at all at http://www.onesmarthost.co.uk/Web-Hosting-Plans.html
I assume you must offer it, but is it Mysql or some other database that might be new to me? what is offered with each plan?

Anni

I must have missed that off those pages, and also the free domain name (1st year) for annual sign-ups.

We offer MYSQL v4 (3 Databases) on the starter plan, we also offer either PHP v4 or v5 which can easily be switched in the Helm Control Panel.

Aaron
We’re there
Thank you for your open helpful responses. I’ve just spoken to the customer and she’s happy to give it a shot and there’ll hopefully be a second customer (linked heavily with the first) too at the same time.
Timescale:
We are applying for a grant and have to wait for approval (3-4 weeks) before we can start, so bear with me if it all goes a bit quiet for a while. We are 99% sure of the grant funding and so it should just be a timing issue.
Thanks again for all your proactive help.

I’ll be in touch soon...

Anni

Thats great news, a good thing to remember is that our hosting plans allows multi domains in separate web space areas for the same price.

Thanks

Aaron

Aaron,
Yes but not separate Invoice names I’m guessing? It’s two Businesses/Associations where one owner is kind of on the committee for the other, which means that one is influenced by the other, but other than that they are two distinct entities.

Anni

Depending on the customers needs they could host multiple websites / domains under one customer account - control panel login

Customer A (All Invoices to customer A)
--- Domain1.com
--- Domain2.com
--- Domain3.com

This works fine providing the customer does not mind the domains being in the same control panel area and billable to Customer A, but if customer A does not want Domain3.com to be part of his control panel account the owner of domain3 would have to purchase their own hosting account.

Sounds a bit confusing but basically Although Customer A has 3 domains each one in its own right to the web viewer would be its own entity, multi domain hosting is just a background thing making web hosting cheaper for my customers.

Hi Aaron
It took a while for the Clients grant to come through, but it’s here now and I’ve just applied online for a hosting account with your Company (The second one will come through in the next couple of week as a separate account).
I may also have a third one shortly too.

I’ve left a message for you on your answering machine and hope you’ll give me a call when you can to help me get this set up...


Thanks again

Anni

Hi Anni,

I have just setup your accounts if you have any problems just let me know.

Thanks and welcome to Onesmarthost.co.uk

:D

Aaron