Transfer your domain name

If you registered a new domain name when ordering your web hosting then this should automatically be done for you and within the next 2 to 24 hours your domain name should be ready to use. If you already have an existing domain name which needs to be transferred, then this needs to be done asap so that you can fully use your reseller web hosting account. In the interim you can log into WebCP to manage your hosting setup using the IP address of the server. Once logged in, the next most imporant step is to add packages!

Adding Packages to your reseller account

Once you’ve logged into your reseller account in WebCP you need to find the “Packages” link in the main navigation links, and you need to create your web hosting packages. You have absolute freedom in determining how your packages are structured in terms of disk space allowance, traffic allowance, email account limits, databases, etc. You also have absolute freedom in determining the prices you set for the accounts you want to sell.

Most Important Step!

Once you’ve created packages, you MUST assign your OWN account to one of your packages by going to “Domains -> Add domain”. This will “link” your domain to the server.

Your own account now has been assigned and you will be able to add new client accounts to your hosting.

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Account Management

You need software to manage all your client accounts. For this, every reseller gets WebCP web hosting control panel. Using WebCP you setup your packages, manage accounts and settings on the server. WebCP is an industry standard web hosting account manager and you’ll find it indespensible.

Your clients will also need to manage their individual web hosting accounts. For this, they have WebCP web hosting control panel client logon. WebCP has a user login which gives end users limited functionality. WebCP works to run your web hosting business effortlessly.

Billing Manager / Automatic Account Setup

Ok, so far we have account management software for you and your clients. Now we need some great billing software. At this stage, we recommend using WHMCS. WHMCS is an optional add on at R150 / month. WHMCS is an industry leader in web hosting billing management and control. Using WHMCS your clients can easily order place their orders and there are many modules to automatically order domain names, make payment through various payment providers and automatic setup of web hosting accounts. This software will automatically bill clients at the end of their billing cycles, it can be set to automatically suspend overdue accounts, etc

WHMCS also has a technical support ticketing system, and knowledge base, download area, etc, etc. The list really does go on and on. You can view info from WHMCS’s website

Everything you need

So, with PHP-Web-Host.com you really do get everything you need to start your own web site hosting business by becoming a reseller web hoster. Plus, we don’t only do web hosting. We also do web developement. This means that not only can we provide tech support for hosting, but we’re often able to help our clients with development issues too!

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Why become a web hosting reseller?

There are a few great reasons why you would want to become a web hosting reseller. For one, you don’t have the headache of managing your own server, that gets done for you. If you are just starting out offering web hosting as one of your services, jumping in and getting your own server setup will probably be a bit of a disaster. Not to sound too melodramatic, but there is alot that can go wrong, and with the incredibly high rate of spammer and brute force attacks, it most likely will.

Besides the advantage of not having to be concerned with the technical and security aspects of setting up your own web hosting servers, reseller hosting offers a much cheaper alternative to enter the web hosting market. You can order your reseller web hosting and be up and running the same day.

Who decides how much you charge your clients and what packages you can offer them?

You do (if you buy reseller web hosting from PHP-Web-Host.com). Many companies who offer reseller web hosting will limit what you can sell, and how you can charge for it. With PHP-Web-Host.com, you order your reseller web hosting and then you have complete freedom to decide how to manage your own clients. You decide how you want your web hosting packages to look, how much disk space to allocate, how much traffic, how many email addresses, etc, and you decide how much to charge for it. The only limit you have is the disk space and traffic limits of your current reseller web hosting account, as well as the TOS and AUP of PHP-Web-Host.com.

White label reseller web hosting – what is it?

White label reseller web hosting, anonymous reseller web hosting, call it whatever you want to, but your clients are yours! White label means that your clients order directly from your own web site. You bill them. You provide them support (we of course will support you). This means that your clients do not even know we exist. They only know about you. This means that any referral or repeat business goes directly to you.

I want to get reseller web hosting!

To order your web hosting reseller account, you can go to our “Reseller Web Hosting” products page.

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This is a step by step guide on setting up your single address email forwarding.

• Log into webcp lite and click on the Emails–>Forwarding link

Email forwarding

• In the email forwarding screen, enter the NAME part (local_part) of the email address and select the domain part from the drop down list. Then enter the forwarding address and click on “Add new email forwarder”. See the image for an example:

• When done, you will see a listing of your forwarded emails above the input boxes. You can add new forwarders or delete existing ones.

How does this email forwarding work?

When you enter an email address and a forwarding address, in the example above we’re forwarding [email protected] to john@forwarding_address.com, then any email sent to [email protected] will ALSO be delivered to john@forwarding_address.com. This means that BOTH email addresses will receive the mail!

Does my email address need to exist?

The forward to email address does need to exists, but the actual email address you want to forward does not. In this case, it works somewhat like an email alias.

For instance, assume I have a domain called testing.com. I set up an email address called [email protected] and I forward that to my gmail account. So far, so good!

Now I decide I want to print the email address [email protected] on my printed media. Because email from this email address will come to me, and I want to receive it in my gmail account too, I don’t bother setting up a [email protected] email address, I simply add a [email protected] forwarder to my gmail email account.

Can I forward the same email address to multiple addresses?

Yes, you can. Lets assume I’ve forwarded the address [email protected] to my gmail email address. I then get a PA who also needs to see the [email protected] emails. I can simply add a forwarder for that email address to her gmail too.

In this way, [email protected]’s email will be forwarder to multiple email addresses.

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IPv6 Web Hosting is necessary as IPv4 addresses are depleted. ISPs in particular are slow to adopt IPv6, so its unlikely you’ll be able to use IPv6 on your home modem, but given that we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses its just a matter of time before your ISP is forced to switch to IPv6.

When that happens, we’ve got you covered. Our web hosting services are IPv6 ready. Take a look at our IPv6 test below:

We’re IPv6 Ready!

The interesting part about getting our servers IPv6 ready was the extent to which server to server communications already use IPv6. I watched the mail server for a while after enabling IPv6 on this server and many other servers out there talk over IPv6.

You should beg, moan at and annoy your ISP until they get their service up to speed!

How do you get IPv6 working?

Moan at your ISP…. Ok, that’s not likely to get you anywhere in the short term. For now though, you can use a tunnel broker. A tunnel broker is a company which let you use your IPv4 address, and they “translate” that into IPv6. I personally use http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ on my laptop. Its free and took about 5 minutes to setup.

To test it once you’re done, go on over to our IPv6 only test server, http://ipv6.rsa.pw. If you can see the site, then you’re IPv6 is working. Otherwise, keep trying to get it working!

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A note about Shared Web Hosting

To understand the concept of a maximum number of websites per server, you should understand exactly what shared web hosting is.

Shared web hosting, as its name implies, is a server running many separate web hosting accounts. This means that your web site is one web site in a large number of websites, much like you may have many working folders on your own PC.

As the image to the left shows, each web hosting account on the server is like a new hole in a bucket, consuming resources. The more web hosting accounts, the less resources there are available. Too many websites on a single server and things could get nasty!

How many web hosting accounts do we have per server?

Why do we have a low number of web hosting accounts per server?

It has to do with a number of factors:

1. Resource usage: Each web hosting account consumes resources, ie, memory, processing power, bandwidth, etc. By keeping the number of web hosting accounts per server low, we maintain a much higher grade of service than you’re used to!
2. Closely related to that is the effect of a sudden spike in traffic on several websites. If all the shared hosting accounts were on one server, then a spike in traffic and resource usage could affect ALL web hosting accounts. By splitting web hosting accounts up we can minimise or eliminate that effect.
3. Badly coded websites are not disastrous and are easier to find. Similarly to point 2 above, if one or two websites are coded badly and have “memory leaks” or long loops which cause high resource consumption, they could affect the whole server and all accounts on it. By keeping the number of web hosting accounts low per server its much easier to find and work with the owners to correct this, but it also means that it doesn’t compromise all web hosting accounts.
4. Its safer for security. If one website owner has a site which is easily hacked (uses weak passwords, etc), it cannot affect all sites on the server meaning that recovery is much, much faster (note that our server security set up generally means that hacking of a site due to poor FTP passwords, etc will be limited to that site only anyway. Still, better safe than sorry!).
5. WordPress and Joomla optimised. The Web Hosting Pro and Web Hosting Advanced accounts have a maximum number of 10 and 5 web hosting accounts per server respectively. This means a very low impact on the servers. This means that CMS sites like WordPress and Joomla which require more resources run properly. Because of the low number of sites, we are also able to set much higher limits of memory usage per website.

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Over sold reseller web hosting (or shared) is exactly as its name implies. In the same way that airlines will sometimes over book flights knowing that there will be some cancellations and no shows, many web hosting providers also over sell web hosting.
As an example, lets say we have a server PC with 200Gb hard disk space to share amoungst the reseller web hosting clients. Lets further assume we have a 50Gb reseller web hosting package. Logic would dictate that we can have 4 reseller accounts on this server, right? Wrong! Many web hosting providers will over sell their reseller hosting accounts, so they might actually sell 8 or more packages to resellers.
In the same way that airlines bank on the fact that there are cancellations and no shows, hosting providers will count on the fact that when the resellers sell, for example, 100Mb to their clients, on average their clients will only use 10 or 20 megs, so on average, over selling reseller hosting will not actually cause disk space to run out.

Does PHP-Web-Host.com over sell its reseller web hosting?

NO WAY! Even though over selling can work, because, as explained, on average, most end users will use far less than what they’ve been allocated, we don’t want to EVER over sell reseller (or shared) hosting for 1 simple reason. The resources (notably RAM) on the server is then split amongst more and more web sites. So, lets assume on our theoretical 200Gb server, we have 4 reseller web hosts and they each have 10 clients. That’s 40 websites on the server and things will run smoothly and quickly.
Lets assume a competitor also has a 200Gb hosting server BUT, they over sell, so they sell to 10 web hosting resellers, who each have 10 clients. This results in 100 websites on the server, as opposed to our 40.

Enquire about over selling

Before deciding on a web hosting company to use for your reseller hosting requirements, do enquire from them if they do over selling of their server space or not. If they do, you can bet their servers will slow down significantly as the number of sites on that server increase.
Please do let us know what you think by leaving a comment below…

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There are 3 easy ways to use FTP

1) FTP as a normal folder drag and drop operation.

Just as you can drag and drop files from one folder to another on your PC, you can open an FTP session in a normal folder and then do drag and drop operations between the web server and files on your PC. To do this,
1) open any folder, eg, My Documents.
2) In the address bar, type ftp://servername.com (change servername.com to what your actual web address is). Click on enter. This will open an anonymous FTP folder.

3) Now we need to log in. In Windows 7 you can RIGHT click somewhere in the folder and click on “Login As” in the pop up menu, In prior versions of Windows you could also click on the File menu, then select “Login As

Using a Folder for FTP

Log in to using the Folder method of FTP

4) In the login box, enter your user name and password, then click on “Log on”. You will now be in a folder which is one level before where you’re web files are stored.
5) Double click on either the “public_html” or the “www” folder to go into it. Now you should be in the root directory of your website, ie the home directory.

Click on public_html

To move files from this folder on the web server to your local PC, or vice versa, simply drag and drop as usual. You can also delete files or rename them as you usually would.

Copy files with FTP by normal drag and drop

The disadvantage with this method is that it does not seem to work as well on larger file transfers. If, during an upload or download the connection goes down, the connection is not retried automatically and the download / upload is not resumed as with FTP software. This method is nice and simple for small numbers of files with a small file size.

2) Cpanel File Upload / Download

You can also upload / download files from within CPanel. Log in to your Cpanel account. This is at www.yourserver.co.za/cpanel.

Log into Cpanel on your Web Hosting Package

Once logged in, double click on the files manager icon in the files section. This should open a file manager in the root (home) directory of your site. Go to the directory you want to upload the file into. You will see an upload button in the tool bar. Click on this and accept the prompt by clicking on OK. In the next screen, click on a browse button and find the file you want to upload. Clicking on OK should begin the upload. When its complete, you will see 100% complete in the progress bar. Using the download button you can also download files to your PC.

File Section in Cpanel

Transferring files this way is rather slow and not particularly recommended. We do use this file manager with FileZilla FTP software (described next) for quickly uploading large numbers of files. We’ll talk about that last.

3) FileZilla FTP Software

The third and probably the best method of up / down loading content between your PC and the web host’s web servers is by using a FTP program. We use the opensource FTP software called FileZilla. FileZilla is a free and open source application available to download from their website.

FileZilla Sections

The big advantage of using software specifically designed for this purpose is speed and reliabilty. Often with very big files, the server may timeout and disconnect you, meaning that you have to restart your up / download. With FileZilla, the connection is automatically reconnected and the up / download is resumed from where it was last. In fact, with some large files (bigger than about 10Mb), I simply cannot get it to upload using the folder method described in point 1 above. The FTP connection keeps dropping and with no reconnection or resume, its simply impossible.

Drag and Drop with FileZilla

Mix FTP Methods for Best Results

In some situations, it may be that mixing methods makes the most sense. If you have a large number of folders and files, then you may want to use steps 2 and 3.

Lets assume you have created your entire website on your PC locally, and lets assume its hundreds of files in several different folders. Using FTP software to upload hundreds of small files in dozens of directories could take quite a lengthy period of time as each file and folder is uploaded individually.

Unzipping a file with Cpanel

I’ve found that the fastest solution in this case is to ZIP the entire website, then use FileZilla to upload this single ZIP file. Then go into CPanel and use the file manager’s uncompress function to unzip the the ZIP file. This takes seconds to do.

So, there you have it. 3 Methods to send your files to your web hosting account!

Which is Your Favourite Method?

Which method of FTP do you prefer to use? What is your favourite FTP software?

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Unlimited allowances

Certain web hosting companies offer unlimited disk allowances and traffic. You may be tempted to buy web hosting from them, but, the truth of it is is that this concept does not exist and it is merely a sales gimmick. We have an article about oversold hosting which explains why this is not a good idea, and why we won’t sell in this way. In a nutshell, they sell space you won’t use and tend to overload their servers with many clients, thus placing a massive load on the server.

Pick what you need

When deciding on web hosting, pick what you need. Many clients think that they should pay for a more expensive package to get a better quality of service. This is an absolute misconception. Our recommendation is that you always start with the smallest web hosting package that you can, and increase it as your needs change over time. We have a Web Hosting Picker to help you choose the best option.

Don’t forget about emails

Other web hosting companies offer very small web hosting packages. As we’ve already mentioned, your website is likely to be small, and traffic on your website low, at least initially, BUT, if you are also using emails at your domain name then every email sent and received counts towards your traffic allowance, so going too small here might be a problem. Remember too, that if you have your email set up to leave message on the server rather than deleting them when they’ve been downloaded, then that counts towards the disk space too, and that can grown very quickly (particularly if you’re super popular!).

If you need help choosing web hosting

If you feel lost and you need help, please contact us through our support system or post a comment here…

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