Web Hosting Geek
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Top Web Hosts? A Guide On Spamming In Web Hosting!
Posted by Web Hosting Geek in Jan 14, 2010, under General Web Hosting
The “top web hosting” or “best web hosting” lists and directories are probably the most popular way to spam the web hosting industry. What do those folks do and how to recognize them?
1. Someone registers any kind of domain that contains words “top”, “web hosting”, “best”, “10″ and any other words like those with or without dashes between them. The owners are often affiliated with web hosting providers or are web hosting providers.
2. The contacts of the domain are on WhoIs privacy, so consumers can not find who is the real owner.
3. There is no criteria published on the website, so its visitors to understand how the site owener ranked so-called “best” or “top” web hosting providers.
4. The lists of “best” web hosts consists of Bluehost, HostGator, Hostmonster (A HostGator clone, owned by Bluehost), IXwebhosting (see opinions in the forums), probably JustHost. Those are five of the usual suspects. I shall say that from all of those I consider as decent web host only HostGator. All others are probably fine for small websites, but are either cheap or oversellers.
5. All “top 10″ or “best 10″ web hosts sell “unlimited” disc space and bandwidth
6. All of them (or at least most of them) offer Free domain registration.
7. Most of them use every single opportunity they have to parasite on your website (See this article “Web Host Uses Whois Of Customers’ Domains To Advertise“).
8. Most of “top web hosting providers” offer high and often quite unrealistic affiliate payouts and use hidden TOS to limit their affiliates.
9. Sadly most of those “top web hosting providers” come from the U.S. or Canada, or just pretend to be American.
10. Most of them are Shared Hosting providers.
I shall say that this “Guide On Spamming In Web Hosting” does not aim to hurt the reputation of the above mentioned web hosting providers. It is not my fault that they are the one to appear in 99.9% of the false “top web hosting providers” lists and directories. It is funny, it is an ocassion to point our fingers at them, but it is not a reason to blame them. They just want you money!
Web Hosting Account Transfer With cPanel and WHM
Posted by Web Hosting Geek in Jan 08, 2010, under Web Hosting Tutorials
Do you use cPanel/WHM to manage your web hosting customers. Hope so, because if you have based your web hosting customer base and services on this web hostign control panel you have made the right choice. This article describes the steps anyone shall make to transfer web hosting customer on one server to another using WHM/cPanel.
The only thing you must have to accomplish this task successfully is to have root access and to know your clients login information. Start with this:
1. Login to your current WHM panel. Go to DNS Functions, choose “Edit a DNS Zone” and then choose the web hosting account (accounts) that you want to transfer.
2. In the zone file you there is @ IN 14400 SOA. Change the “14400″ to 3600. The 14400 accounts to 4 hours. By making the change you will shorten this period to 1 hour.
3. Got to section “Records” with several entries under the TTL (Time To Live) heading that have 14400 in them. Change these to 3600.
4. Update the serial number by 1 to show this is the newest update, save it, and do the same for each website.
When ready login to your new WHM server and go the section titled “Transfers”. There are several options under this heading . Focus on the first 3 of them.
The 1st one is available if you have root access on the original host server and only need to copy 1 account, or only wish to copy one account at a time. The 2nd option is available if you do not have root on the original server, but you know your clients login information. The 3rd option has to be used if you have root on the original server and want to copy all accounts to the new one at once. Here are the next steps:
5. Find out if the websites you are about to transfer are static or dynamic. Static sites are mainly HTML with no actively used database, dynamic refers to use of any form of database. If you need to transfer static website, there is nothing much to prepare. You can start. If you need to transfer a dynamic website, you have to shut down the database for an hour until the website is redirected from the old server.
6. Choose the option you wish to use to transfer the web hosting accounts.
7. Fill in the original servers IP, username and password. Choose whether to give the site an IP on the new server, and what type of server you are transferring from. Then click setup.
8. The new server will attempt to login via FTP and package the account up with databases, and email accounts/passwords intact. It will then transfer and setup the account on the new server, and if all is correct, you will receive a message stating the transfer was successful.
9. Under DNS Functions, choose “Edit a DNS Zone”, choose the account you want to edit, and change the name servers information to reflect your name servers, instead of the default name server values of the server, increase the serial number by one, save. Repeat this operation for each account.
10. Log back into your 1st server, and in the “Records” section, change all instances of the original IP to the new IP on the new server. Increase the serial number by one, save and close.
11. Repeat the steps from 5 to 10 for each web hosting account.
In about an hour, once the TTL cycles, the websites will be resolving on the new server. Go to your domain registrar and update the IPs of your name servers to reflect your new IPs.
Those are 11 steps to follow. Please note that there are plenty of additional steps related to cPanel design template and number of functions that your customers might use.
