I launched a client on GoDaddy hosting today, and while I was nosing around in his Wordpress admin site I noticed how very sl-l-o-o-w it was. I did a little research on GoDaddy and found that that’s pretty much the consensus.

One writer mentioned a reverse IP lookup tool that tells you how many domains are on any given IP address. I checked my client’s name and found over 3,500 other domains are hosted there. Then I checked my own host server and there are 1,900.

I don’t know what’s considered too many, but I suspect that GoDaddy might be being slowed down by sheer numbers here.

Since the support times have been growing steadily at my current host, I’m considering a move - this time to a greener company.  Here’s an article I found from 2007 about the growing number of green web hosts.

I’ve been looking into a few that offer reseller plans:

• thinkhost.com
• gogreenhosting.com
• AISO.net

Most of these have pricing levels significantly higher than what I’m paying now, which would be a consideration. But if anyone has used these companies and has an opinion either way about them, I’d love to hear about it.

I have a client whose site was ready to launch tonight. I just logged into her admin area on a popular (at least in my town) domain registrar that offers one of those free website template builder systems.

My client’s site was built using one of these packages and has been up for months.

So I go in to repoint the DNS to her new host and I’m told that the DNS is ‘unmodifiable.’ No explanations… I’d never seen that before.

After about 10 minutes of hunting through the help section I found an entry for ‘Why can’t I change my DNS?’ at the bottom of a long list of DNS questions. It seems that you have to disable the templating package before you can repoint to an outside DNS.

And when you do that, their site disappears and you’re left with the registrar’s ‘This domain has just been purchased’ and ‘website coming soon’ page.

During the 24-48 hour transition period, this means that anyone who happens on her old site will get this page rather than her site. This is really a bad practice on the part of the registrar in my opinion - is it common for those that offer this kind of web templating system, like GoDaddy? This site was not on GoDaddy, btw.

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed - I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package - I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…

I’m a newish reseller for a certain hosting company that offers WHM AutoPilot as a free automated services center for hosts. This program is pretty cool - basically it’s a tool that exists on your site and lets people sign up for hosting and other services automatically. They sign up for what they want, pay, their account is set up and they get billed for it periodically all without the reseller’s input.

The control panel for WHMAP is pretty well done, it makes sense and is easy to get synchronized with the data you’ve entered in WHM (the hosting manager that integrates with cPanel). However, I found that integrating it into my site proved harder than first thought. My host is not using the latest version of WHMAP, but I’m not sure if that’s a factor here or not…

You create a header and footer template that matches the rest of your site and WHMAP feeds its data into the central area of the page, however you’ve defined that in a div or a (shudder) table cell. That went fine - it popped in nicely.

However, the problems started when I wasn’t happy with the way lines of text ran together. There are many spacing and formatting issues right out of the box, and applying CSS styles to some of these was just agonizing for me.

I probably spent a good 5-6 hours playing with just the first step of the order process and still wasn’t even close to making it pretty on the page. I knew that WHMAP has a big brother named WHM Complete Solution. I knew it wasn’t free, but I’d heard from other resellers that it was much easier to deal with.

I told my husband of my coding woes and asked him what he thought about me buying WHMCS rather than continuing to struggle with WHMAP. He shook his head and told me ‘go get it.’ Why waste so much time, he said, when I could probably be cruising along with the better product?

I downloaded the 15-day trial of WHMCS and had the thing loaded and running in about an hour. I’m not quite done with the integration, but it certainly was a heck of a lot easier than WHMAP and looks 100% better. I’m really happy with it, and the price tag ($166 I think if you buy a copy outright) is in my opinion extremely reasonable. It makes my hosting site look pretty professional, IMHO, and I hope to have it up and running by this weekend.

This is a question I’m confronting right now, as I’m setting up the new hosting section of my website.

To find out, I went through about a dozen of my clients’ sites to find out what they were using. Note that all of these sites are CSS, most validate fully for (X)HTML and are cleanly coded.

I have a few clients with pretty simple static sites of 8-20 pages, a few small (optimized) images but mostly text. Their sites were typically about 70-90 mb on the server.

I have one CMS (Joomla) site with a good number of photos and the equivalent of about 30 ‘pages’ of content; that one’s taking up about 130mb at the moment.

I have a photographer with an e-commerce solution, two databases and about 425 photos (all optimized .jpg’s); this site is around 250mb.

I have another photographer with no e-commerce but an open source image gallery. His image database contains around 900-1,000 images, some pretty good sized but all are (or should be) optimized. The site is around 10 pages plus the image gallery and is at about 750mb.

Finally I have my business website Parallax Web Design. I checked its size when it had 5-6 production sites running, and a total of maybe 8 MySQL databases. It was taking up around 1gb at that time.

So from my experience, I’m pretty confident that I can host a small static site with a 500mb disk allotment. My current host for all of these sites (except Parallax)  offers at a minimum a 100gb plan - this is totally unnecessary for any of my current clients.

Does this kind of measurement hold true for other web designers managing hosting their own clients out there? Do you have small business clients that really need 400gb of space, and if so, what kind of sites are they running?

My business site was back up at 9:00 tonight - 13 hours after the DNS change began. That’s about 4 times longer than it took when I set up the account, and the techs for my host told me that there was a mistake in the DNS when they switched it back this morning.

This is the first problem I’ve had with them, but it could have been a costly one, say, if I was a retailer. I’ll remember not to go changing any master domain names from now on.

Yesterday I confirmed with my host (twice) that changing the master account domain name would have no effect whatsoever on my business website, www.parallaxwebdesign.com, and I needed a different domain to oversee my hosting accounts. So I told them go ahead and do it.

Instead of moving parallaxwebdesign.com to its own account and creating an empty master account with the new domain name, they instead just changed my master name to the new domain name and left all of my content there - which was not at all what they said they’d do.

Now it’s going on 14 hours that my site has been nonexistent. I finally got them to just change the name back - that happened this morning while I was at a meeting with a client who found it odd that my own website couldn’t be found. I was not happy.

I just got home from being in Denver all day and lo and behold - my site is STILL not up. I am really getting angry, there’s no reason it should be taking this long. I’ve been so happy with this host, and this is the first thing that’s gone wrong with them but it makes me look stupid and careless when my website is down.

One more hour and I’m going to consider setting up a temporary account on another host. My business site has to be up. And I need my email. Now.