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Posts Tagged ‘Business’

100% Uptime Guaranteed Cloud Hosting by XeHost

Friday, August 27th, 2010

 

XeHost is proud to announce its new 100% Uptime Guaranteed Cloud Shared Hosting Plans! These plans are powered by our new high-performance, high availability Storage Area Network (SAN). Even in the event of a complete serve failure, your data will always be protected and online! In other words, this SAN allows for us to offer a 100% uptime guarantee on all of our cloud shared hosting plans!

What exactly is cloud hosting?
Cloud Hosting is new, innovative technology which is slowly gaining popularity in the web hosting market. Essentially, it is an internet-based form of hosting where several different servers are used to share resources, software, and information. In the event that a service crashes, our systems will automatically revert over to a backup system. This allows for us to offer complete redundancy!

Is cloud hosting for me?
Cloud hosting is for extremelly popular sites that require lots of resources and businesses or consumers that demand 100% uptime for their website. Some types of web sites that may be interested in this service include online stores, affiliate marketers, web designers, photographers, and small businesses.

Where can I learn more?
To view a complete overview of our cloud web hosting plans, click here.

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Posted in Business, Company News, Internet | No Comments »

Free WHMCS Upgrade for XeHost Reseller Clients

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

At XeHost, we are very proud to offer many different value-added services to our reseller clients at no additional cost including a Free WHMCS License, Free End-User Support, Free WHMReseller Master Reseller Software, Free Enom Domain Reseller Account, Free Hosting Template, and more!

Earlier today, WHMCS launched the newest version of their leading billing and client management software, WHMCS Version 4.3.1. Some upgrades and new features include the following:

New Features & Enhancements

New Ajax Order Form – fully customisable, open-source, ajax based order process with live order summary

Per Billing Cycle Invoice Settings – Now you can specify for different billing cycles to generate at different times, for example your monthly items could generate 14 days in advance while annual items could generate 30 days in advance

Twitter Integration – a client side integration with twitter to display the latest tweets from your company twitter account along with a follow icon pointing to your twitter page

Product Addons – Weighting ability to customise display order of addons, added the ability to easily transfer an addon from one of the clients products to another, and improved adding process to make pricing retrieval more intuitive

Admin Order Review – Optimised display to show clients full name/address to aid manual fraud checking, added the ability to manually re-test an order with MaxMind after editing clients details, and optimised loading time by converting Affiliate Assign to Ajax load on request only

Admin Add Order Process – Expanded to support product addons & quantities of a product being ordered

Client Area Search & Sorting – the My Products/Services & My Domains lists in the client area have had the ability to sort by any column and users to search for a specific domain they own added

Suspension Reasons – now when performing a manual suspend you can specify a reason for that suspension to be displayed in the admin area, client area, and suspension notification email – automated suspensions default to non-payment

Live Ticket Status Updates – WHMCS will now monitor in the background and notify you if any other admins have started replying to a ticket if you start replying, and also on submission if the status has changed since you opened it to indicate another admin has already dealt with it

Expanded Downloads Features – Added the ability for downloads to be associated to addons so that addons can provide access to additional downloads automatically when purchased like with products

Promotions Recurring Limits – Coupons can now be set to recur for a set number of cycles, allowing offers such as “Get your first 3 months at half price” for example

Customisable Admin Email Templates – You can now customise the New Order, Support Ticket Response, Automatic Setup Failure, Domain Renewal Failure and Service Unsuspension admin email notifications like existing email templates

Client Default Payment Method – the admin profile page now allows an admin user to change the payment method of all a clients products, services & open invoices in one quick action

Config Options Monthly Breakdown – updated the order process product configuration step to also apply monthly breakdown pricing to configurable options if enabled

Checkout Credit Card Payment – if a credit card based payment gateway is chosen during checkout, in a more streamlined process the client is now asked to enter their card details as part of checkout rather than following checkout being completed

Multiple Free Subdomain Choices – ability to specific more than 1 subdomain a client can choose from as an alternative to domain registration at Products Signup

Read-only/Locked Client Profile Fields – ability to choose which fields from the main profile name, email, address fields are editable

Affiliate Withdrawal Enhancements – can now automatically create a transaction out or credit entry for the client direct from the admin affiliate withdrawal screen

cPanel Reseller Upgrades – Added support for automated reseller disk/bandwidth package upgrades

Release Domain Support – added support for registrar modules to contain a release function to automate transfer out of domains so Nominet module supports IPSTAG changes from within WHMCS – can be admin only or clients can also be given access to perform it

Additional Hook Points – AdminLogin/Logout, ClientClose, AdminHomepage, AdminServiceEdit, TicketOpenAdmin & TicketAddNote, Pre(xxx) event for all module command hooks

Upgrade Order Process – added automatic redirect to gateway ability like main cart system

Client Summary Generate Invoices – popup prompt added to ask if you want invoices emailing or generating only so you can edit first

NameCheap Registrar – Updated to latest API & added support for NameCheap Promo Codes

Batch PDF Exporter – added additional filter option of Payment Method and Sorting ability

VirtualMin – Added support for reseller account automation and disk & bandwidth usage stats importing

Invoice Payment Methods – updated to only show the payment methods enabled for the product group(s) the items on the invoice belong to

Wildcard IP Bans – added support for banning entire IP ranges, for example 91.123.*

Mass Pay Invoices – excluded from client area due invoices list and due balance totals to avoid affecting displayed balance

UK Postcode Auto Formatting – rules now auto applied to ensure UK postcode format which was causing Nominet UK domain registrations to fail

cPanel Module – updated to use new V11.25 reseller specific API calls, added option to prevent reseller owning their own account

Plesk Reseller Module – added permission settings to be configurable within WHMCS

Order Notification – any custom order notes specified by the customer are now included in the notification email

New Email Template Merge Fields – invoice_tax2, invoice_tax_rate2, domain_dns_management, domain_email_forwarding, domain_id_protection, domain_do_not_renew, service_suspension_reason

Direct Admin Links – added direct links to view a support ticket and new order in admin notification emails

Added Additional API Calls – AddContact, DeleteContact, GetInvoices, GetProducts, UpdateClientProduct, UpdateContact & UpdateInvoice

Stronger Random Password Generator – the automated passwords generated for products/services auto provisioning has been improved to ensure they always include a mix of both upper/lowercase chars & numbers

InterWorx Module – Added support for reseller account creation & management

Backdated Invoice Payments – If adding a transaction to an invoice with a date in the past which marks it paid, the invoice date of payment is now set to the date entered also rather than current date

Domain Renewal Restrictions – The default per TLD domain renewal restrictions can now be customised for advanced users via the config file

SSL Configuration – added support for SSL certificates without the approver email step

Enom Module – Various fixes & enhancements

Invoice Resend Confirmation – added button to resend payment confirmation email receipt

Smarty Error Checking – improved error handling should mean any email template syntax errors will now be recorded in the activity log rather than displaying a blank page

Nominet – Added support for IPS Tag Change Requests by Admins & Clients (Optional)

Improved Email Piping Charset Handling – improvements to converting of emails being received in different charsets to local charset

Improved Multi-Line & Multi-Page PDF Handling – updates to templates to better handle multiple line item descriptions and splitting accross multiple pages

Updated TinyMCE Rich Text Editor – Added to product config descriptions also

Mobile Edition – Added search facility for clients, products, invocies & tickets. Also added invoice browsing, viewing and editing as well as invoice creation

New Gateway Modules

Authorize.net CIM (Remote Card Storage)
BluePay (Remote Card Storage)
IP.Pay
Mollie iDeal
MWarrior
Payment Express

New Provisioning Modules

VPS.Net
GlobalSign SSL
FluidVM
XPanel

New Registrar Modules

OpenSRS Domain Sync Script
ResellOne Domain Sync Script
Bizcn
IPMirror
InternetBS
NetRegistry

Bug Fixes

Client Area Product Details Page showing module specific auto-login links for suspended products
Client group discount was being applied to mass pay invoices
3D Secure Process wasn’t always breaking out of frames for some gateway modules
Some advanced search field options were leading to a blank page
TLDs where only 10 years pricing was set were not showing after triennial addition
Billable Items uninvoiced work count in client profile list was displaying double
Affiliates greater/less than filter options were not filtering correctly
Report graphs were failing to generate on some PHP5 setups
Triennial product cycle pricing was not being automatically updated in exchange rate sync
Promo code required addons check was not considering addons to a new product in the order
Homepage announcements summary was not using localised language version if available
Email template merge field client_cc_expiry was not being populated
Upgrade of products was not creating new configurable option placeholders for those belonging to new product
General Settings page was hanging while checking support modules on PHP 5.3
Fixed Windows IIS PHP_SELF loop redirect issues
Email Address not accepting + seperator
Quote convert to invoice button was resulting in a blank page
Knowledgebase looping endlessly if no categories are found to own an article
Improved handling of situations where the billing contact assigned to a client is deleted – revert back to primary profile
Escalation rules were not including custom ticket statuses in selectable options
Modified admin client dropdowns to sort by company name if company name first is selected display type
When deleting a department, tickets were becoming orphaned left belonging to no department
Admin Side Open Ticket inserting predefined replies was clearing existing input
Configurable options were creating a recurring label in order confirmation email even with one time cycle selected
Invoice line item descriptions including hidden configurable options
Billable Items invoiced with next invoice option were not having link established
Attempting to merge a ticket to itself loses ticket entirely
Client area module change password function needed entity encoding for values passed to APIs
Quotes were not working correctly with compound level 2 taxation
New order initial invoice was not always showing discount correctly if product included a setup fee
Admin password reset process was not working with SMTP without auth configurations
File attachments with more than one dot in the filename were often failing allowed extension check
Ticket auto linking of urls was stopping at # symbols
EPP Codes containing an equals sign were not being handled correctly

All XeHost clients are encouraged to submit a support ticket to us to take advantage of this exciting new upgrade free of charge. Simply let us know that you wish to retrieve the latest version of WHMCS and we will make it available for you to download! These same files can be used for either a fresh install or for an upgrade from a previous version.

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Is a Virtual Private Server right for me?

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Undoubtedly, one of the latest fads in the web hosting industry is the Virtual Private Server (VPS for short – also sometimes referred to as VDS or Virtual Dedicated Server). In short, a VPS is a way of splitting a server into multiple partitions using virtualization software. These different partitions can run their own operating system, be rebooted individually, and be completely controlled independent of the other partitions. We utilize this technology to sell these different partitions to users, allowing them to have their own “virtual private server”.

The question now arises “is a VPS right for me?”. Many people incorrectly jump on the VPS bandwagon because of the increased power and control over their service that it grants them but do not really understand what risks they are potentially facing. The two biggest issues to consider when deciding whether to choose to upgrade to a VPS are management and price.

1) Management- With both shared and reseller hosting packages, your hosting provider does a lot for you behind the scenes to ensure that your hosting is stable and secure. The provider frequently hardens, secures, and optimizes the server to prevent any problems. In a VPS enviornment, this technical burden is on you. If you do not posess the technical knowledge to efficiently maintain your VPS (meaning you cannot troubleshoot technical issues yourself, nor can you perform any of the actions previously mentioned effectively), you lose out on the reliability of the service. Sure, there are ways to overcome this problem such as to pay a premium price for a managed VPS plan (one that your hosting provider will manage for you) or you can hire a server management company to help you out. In any case, you are adding more to the cost.

2) Price- Price is the second major factor in choosing whether to upgrade to a VPS or not. While some people get excited to see super-low price VPS plans, there are many results of this “budget” service. Firstly, the VPS will use budget virtualization software. A quick google search will show you many horror stories that result from this – mainly the low-end software being exploited through a vulnerability and then the server getting hacked. In this case, all of your content is often lost. Also, these low end VPS plans do not come with the same software and features that you and your clients would expect (ie. cPanel and Fantastico). You will need to pay extra for these licenses and install them yourself. At the opposite end of the spectra, you can get a high end VPS using the latest and best virtualization technology with the best value-added features but pay significantly more than you would for the same features on a reseller plan. The only real “extra” thing you are getting for the significantly higher price is root access to the server and the ability to host reseller accounts (though some hosts, ourselves included, now have the ability to give reseller customers access to create and host their own reseller accounts).

Now that the two main factors in deciding whether to upgrade to a VPS plan have been addressed, it is time to decide if a VPS plan is right for you. For clients that ask us if we think it is worth it for them to upgrade, we ask them the following two questions:

1) Do you need root access, or do you just want it?
2) Do you think it is worth it to pay more for slightly less features?*

*There are slighly less features on a VPS than a reseller if you use a reseller hosting provider that offers value added services. At XeHost, we offer many different value added services on reseller plans such as a Free WHMCS, End-User Support, a Free Enom Domain Reseller Account, a Free Hosting Template, and much more!

If the client cannot answer yes to both of these questions confidently, then we advise them that a reseller plan may be best for them. While it may be attractive to be on a more expensive hosting platform, they are geting more “bang-for-their-buck” as is. For clients that do answer yes to both questions, a VPS may be a very beneficial solution to them.

At XeHost, we pride ourselves in offering very high-end and high-performance Virtual Private Servers. Here is a breakdown of some of the features that we offer:

8-Core Intel Dual Xeon CPUs- We utilize top-of-the line servers for all of our VPS plans. Budget hosts that run VPS plans often run them on budget servers, hindering the ability of the VPS to meet its full potential. We run our VPS’s on very high end servers to ensure that our VPS plans not only meet but can exceed their specifications (see Burstable RAM below).

RAID10 Disk Space- RAID10 technology allows a hard drive to keep running even if it has failed. While other hosts will experience hours of downtime in the event of a hard drive failure, our high-end drives can keep running even in the event of a hard drive failure. Our technicians will be able to place the failed drive with a new one with minimal to no downtime. Companies that do not utilize this technology will not be able to boot up their servers until the hard drive has been replaced.

Free Backup Disk Space- We understand how important website backups are and constantly emphasize it to our customers. On all VPS plans, we give you backup disk space at an offsite location at no additional cost so that you can backup all of your websites. We even provide industry leading software to help automate backups and ensure that they are taken daily.

R1Soft Enterprise Continuous Data Protection and Recovery- This industry-leading disastery recovery software comes standard on all of our VPS plans. This will allow you to automate frequent backups of your entire VPS and store them on the free off-site backup location that we give you. In the event that you ever need to restore your VPS to a previous date, you can rest assured that we have you covered!

Burstable RAM- On your VPS, we allot you a certain amount of dedicated RAM. This is RAM that you are guaranteed – your VPS will never have less RAM than this to operate. Between all of the VPS’s ran on the server, there is often an excess of RAM because not all VPS’s utilize all of their RAM at any given time. Burstable RAM is the maximum amount of RAM that your VPS can achieve. With our high end servers, you will often find that your VPS can utilize more RAM than we have actually allocated to you.

Virtuozzo Power Panel- Virtuozzo Power Panel is undisputively the best, most powerful, and most secure virtualization platform in the industry today. It comes with a higher price (meaning that budget VPS providers cannot offer you this) but we believe that it is a necessary cost to ensure complete customer satisfaction. With Virtuozzo Power Panel, you can start, stop, reboot, and monitor your VPS via a web-based control panel.

cPanel/WHM- cPanel/WHM is an industry-standard for control panel and website management. For web hosts, your clients will expect a control panel like this if they do business with you. cPanel/WHM licenses come at a cost and budget VPS providers do not eat this cost for you, meaning that you will have to buy your own license if you wish to offer it to your customers. At XeHost, not only do we offer our VPS clients cPanel/WHM for free but we also offer them Fantastico DeLuxe Auto-Installer – an addon software that enables customers to install many different popular PHP scripts with the click of a button.

Free Firewall Protection- We offer all of our VPS clients free firewall protection to help protect them against hackers, ddos attacks, and many other things that can affect the stability and reliability of their VPS.

24×7 Monitoring- Unlike other providers that require you to monitor your VPS, we will monitor it 24×7 to ensure that it remains online. In the event that it crashes, one of our technicians will immediately restart it for you. If the VPS does not start back up, we will contact you to make sure that you are aware there is a situation and so that you can investigate it accordingly, minimizing the downtime that you will experience.

These are just some of the many features that come with all of our VPS plans. To learn more, simply view the “Virtual Private Servers” section of our website.

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Business Secret: Find a niche

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

One of the key secrets to making any business succeed, especially web hosting businesses, is to find a specific niche and to pursue people within that niche as a target market. In certain industries, such as the web hosting industry, startup costs are very low which makes it very it easy for new companies to enter the industry. In industries like these, sometimes there are hundreds if not thousands of different companies for the consumer to choose from.

 

In an industry like web hosting that has literally thousands of different companies for the consumer to choose from, how do you differentiate yourself? Many of the top companies in the industry spend hundreds of thousands a dollars a year to build a brand for themselves as leading hosting providers in the market. Most companies, however, do not have the sort of funds required to build this type of a brand. So what can they do? Well, it’s simple, find a niche!

 

 

What is a niche?

According to Dictionary.com, a niche is a distinct segment of a market. In other words, it is a certain group of people within the entire market.

 

What are some examples of niches?

Well, there are many. Example niches of the web hosting industry include a YouTube clone sites niche, phpBB forums niche, WordPress blogs niche, etc. Essentially, any “community” or “grouping” of specific but related websites can be considered a niche.

 

Why is this important?

A previously stated, in today’s hosting industry where there are thousands of different providers out there; it is extremely difficult to develop a recognizable brand name for your company. However, if you choose to target a specific niche instead, you are decreasing the amount of competitors that you have drastically. This will make it a lot cheaper and more realistic for you to develop a brand name for yourself and thus for you to succeed in the industry. In essence, you are creating a “specialty” for your company, which would make it more appealing within that niche than one of your competitors who does not target the same niche.

 

Should I only accept sales from people within the niche that I target?

Absolutely not, you should still be open and willing to accept sales from everyone. However, it is important to invest a large majority if not all of your marketing resources towards your niche.

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Posted in Business | 1 Comment »