Signing Up With a Competitor

Jun 16, 2012 by

Prior to working on a hosting company, my experience with web hosting as a customer has been:

University-Hosted: When I was a student and Mosaic was the dominant browser.

Brand X Internet: When I lived in LA, I got a recommendation and used these guys.  We’re talking late 90s.  Man look at the beautiful design of their pricing page.

DreamHost: I used DreamHost for many years.  I never thought they were a bad host, despite all that “unlimited” malarkey.  Their web control panel is a custom in-house job.

Big Corporate: I used to admin web servers and related services.  But I’m unlikely to ever run a hosting business on high-end Sun servers with a SAN.

Self-Hosted: I am a VPS junkie and have hosted a lot of sites on my own VPSes.  Usually Debian Linux with nginx+php-fpm.

The point of this chronology is that at no point have I been the classic cPanel shared web hosting customer.  Dreamhost’s panel didn’t give me a cPanel feel, and hosting with nginx/php-fpm is not shared hosting experience.

So I signed up with a semi-random cPanel shared hosting company out of the WHT listings.  I did an hour’s research and picked one, moving one of my personal sites to it.

The experience was interesting.  I noticed the following:

  • The customer experience is a jumble of WHMCS, their help desk software, and cPanel.  The look and feel on each is different and it was really kind of confusing, as it was possible to open a ticket in each area.  I found myself having to refer to my “IMPORTANT EMAIL” many times for links.
  • Other things are not integrated – posting in the forum is a separate registration.
  • As a customer, I was content to open a ticket and get a reply a few hours later.  I never really had the expectation that support would live chat with me or respond in 30 minutes or anything like that.  I mention this because some hosts really emphasize the response SLA.
  • No complaints on the service, speed, etc., though all I’m serving is very light PHP.

I don’t really have any complaints, but it’s been interesting to see how another company does things.  As a customer experience zealot, some of the different logins/looks/etc. would drive me nuts.  Then again, perhaps I am emphasizing unimportant things.

 

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Working Away

Jun 13, 2012 by

My hosting company startup is coming together nicely.  I haven’t had any big decisions to discuss here in the last couple weeks, mainly because I’ve been head’s-down at work on the web site.

I’m not using a hosting company template (because in my opinion they all look alike), which has actually been a great experience as my HTML/CSS/JS skills have improved immensely.  This is my setup:

  • Invision Power Services‘ suite, using IP.Content for pages, IP.Nexus for billing, and IP.Board for the accompanying forum.
  • CodeCanyon for sliders, lightboxes, jQuery, etc.
  • Various stock photo sources I mentioned earlier.
  • Cufon for fonts, as well as a couple free fonts.  I didn’t use Google Fonts because they don’t seem 100% functional in all browers, ironically Chrome itself.  Chrome in Windows x64 has a font issue and it seems very pronounced with web-delivered fonts, though I’ve had zero problems with Cufon.

I’ve got a lot done, and the remaining work looks like this:

  • Web site – about 90% done.  A couple odds and ends left.
  • Nexus – next task.  I’m waiting for 1.5 to go gold, as that includes domain reselling and a couple other things I want.
  • cPanel/WHM – I finished my custom skin and now need to make some plugins for special things I want.
  • Behind-the-scenes – a lot of this is done.  Backups are done (in spades).  Need to setup off-host monitoring, but a lot of the basic maintenance is done.
  • Beta test – in the works.  A few people are suffering with my startup pains.
  • There are a couple common tasks that I need to get familiar with – e.g., some of the cPanel options I’d like to play with before someone opens a ticket.
  • Business setup – this is done.  Company registered, bank account open, etc.

My project plan calls for getting to “can accept orders”.  I’m nearly there (Nexus is the main thing I need to do).  Once I’m at a point where I can open the doors, I can get into the next big project section – marketing.

 

 

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