Looking to start your new business in the Indian web hosting services market-place? Now that you’re taking the plunge into the hosting services market, it must be evident to you by now that it is a huge challenge to enter into this market. This is the reason why you need to brace yourself with sound research on the current market trends along with profound knowledge of successfully managing a dedicated server (Windows or Linux) using the popular control panels such as Plesk or cPanel, in order to offer the latest and the most sought-after features at competitive pricing. For starting your hosting business, you can follow any of the following two models:
1. Reseller Hosting (Shared hosting) provider As a beginner in this market, you can become a reseller for the popular hosting companies. Not only will it help you start cost-effectively, it will also spare you the pain of having to manage the dedicated server all by your own. So, if your targeted customer-base is not too vast, offering shared hosting is a great option for you. To provide your customers with shared hosting, you can buy a reseller account from any of these popular hosting companies and start off immediately without having to set up a primary infrastructure for it. While the reseller account helps you to get up and running with your hosting business in no time, the provider usually manages the server so, you can easily start without any experience with the management of servers. In this case, what really matters is your choice of the reseller hosting provider since a reliable provider plays a major role in the success of your hosting business whether it is about keeping the server online with no downtime or maintaining the server performance to remain high. 2. VPS Hosting To be able to offer VPS Hosting however, it is requisite to have dedicated servers that have preinstalled visualization software, the required storage capacity to the tune of several terabytes with RAID 10 architecture, required RAM (ranging between 16-256 GB) and a central control panel to facilitate automation. You also have the option of availing a preconfigured HyperV from any of the reputed hosting providers to offer VPS to your customers. Steps for starting a new web hosting business Here are the steps you need to follow to start your new hosting business 1. Buy a domain name The first step to starting your hosting business is to decide a unique and commercially viable name for it and then, decide and search a suitable domain name for it that is available for purchase at a reasonable price. 2. Get a website for your hosting business The next step is to start building your website in an SEO friendly fashion so you can market your business online in an impactful manner. This will not only ensure the visibility of your business in the online market-place for hosting business, but it will also help you enhance your reach to your target audience. 3. Get the Software required for your business automation Apart from its low cost advantage and the possibilities to scale it up into a highly profitable venture, what convinces most entrepreneurs about starting a hosting business is its possibility to let one automate almost all the tasks. So, the final and the most essential step for you would be to implement an efficient software. Such software can be usually installed on your website and cal get connected with your payment gateways such as Paypal etc. and your reseller account/VPS/dedicated servers as well along with the control panel. On following these steps, technically speaking, you are up and running with your new hosting business! Looking to also provide web hosting support to your customers? This is an important aspect of your hosting business that you should not overlook if you want to establish yourself as a trusted hosting provider business that imparts uninterrupted support. Get in touch with you and we will guide you as to how you can proceed with it.
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Almost every business is moving or planning its move to the cloud in the days to come. At this juncture when you have decided to make this move, apart from the other decisions that you have to make, an important one is whether to opt for Platform as a service or Infrastructure as a service. And to be in a position to make a choice between the two, you must have the required knowledge about the key differences. In this post therefore, we have tried to cover the major differences between Platform as a service and Infrastructure as a service – these two models of the cloud offerings as provided by your cloud services provider.
There is a huge deal of difference between both IaaS and PaaS in terms of what they offer to the developers. And therefore, the developers really need to understand the differences between the two approaches. 1. While IaaS is more of a ‘build-it-yourself’ kind of a model for cloud implementation, in PaaS you get to avail a system of assembled pieces ready for you to run. 2.With the IaaS offerings such as AWS or the Google Compute Engine, your developers get the access to an integrated set of resources and tools needed for the app development and management. On the other hand, with PaaS for example with Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine, the tools, frameworks and the resources are integrated to the platform and the services related to the data and application execution along with their underlying operating system functions are managed at the vendor’s end. 3.PaaS imparts an end-to-end application development and management package for businesses whereas IaaS is not that advanced in its comparison. So, in case of IaaS, one needs to assemble the different elements of compute, network and storage to make it work as the required system for development. 4.This certainly implies that there is a set of expectations from the client organization’s developers in terms of their skillset in case of IaaS, which may not be the case with PaaS which is a ready to run system. It is true that the tools and resources needed to make an IaaS system work are included in the system but in the case of IaaS, the client organization is responsible for managing the platform on its own. 5.With the developers required to manage their own execution processes, manage the data services and take care of the operating system, on one hand this imparts a degree of flexibility and customization to the organization for their development process, it can also prove to be more time-consuming for them since now, the developers are required to perform more work. Having discussed the difference between the two models and the implications thereof, there is really one basic difference between both which is whether the development tools, framework and the other resources are in-built in the environment or not and therefore on whom does the onus of managing it come – the client organization or the vendor organization. With this basic understanding, I would like to close this article by stating that while many a vendors may suggest you to pick one of the two approaches, in a real-life scenario the situation could be that of adopting a combined approach. For example, an organization might choose to run both IaaS-based and PaaS-based operations alongside or both in conjunction with each other so that for example, the client facing aspects i.e. the front end of their app is built based on PaaS while, since the backend requires more of customization, it might be built using IaaS. So, in this way, we can say that both approaches are adopted – not necessarily completely independently of each other. So, it needs in-depth knowledge and experience working on the cloud platforms to arrive at the perfect cloud strategy for your upcoming application. We, at InstaCarma, are equipped with profound expertise at working on cloud based applications and imparting advanced offerings based on all the three IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. If you are planning to make your move to the cloud and are not sure about which approach to follow, our team will be happy to offer suitable consultation in this regard. Ever wondered what are the skills that your DevOps Organization should look for its resources for them to fit in your DevOps culture. Among the so many skills people keep on talking about as being relevant to a DevOps organization, we have come up with a refined list of the key technical and soft skills that any engineer MUST possess to contribute to the success of the strategy for your organization.
1. Coding Skills It is no more a debate whether a DevOps engineer should possess coding skills or not. So, it is a well-established fact that your DevOps service should be able to deliver solution presented on the form of code. Regardless of which part of the DevOps team the engineer represents – QA, Dev, Ops, Security, DBA or data analytics, the ability to not just ‘code’ but ‘offer solution as a code’ is what counts in this case. So, this ultimately boils down to imparting real business value for the stakeholders of the business ( ranging from the customers to the internal stakeholders). 2. Soft Skills & Communication As a DevOps engineer, it is required to possess the ability to plan one’s communication whether for a sprint planning session, a one-to-one meeting with the manager, coordinating with someone on another team to get things done or communicating some critical details to the stake-holders and decision-makers. Planned and prepared communication where you’re clear about what you’re aiming to get out of a certain communication, becomes even more important when your organization is all set to make its move on to DevOps. Not being prepared for the communication puts you to the risk of not getting what you want out of it, in case the other party has conflicting interests or understanding. 3. Familiarity with Continuous Integration Tools By means of the continuous integration methodology used in DevOps, the source code updates obtained from all the developers get merged on a specific software build and this helps the team stay updated about any failure encountered in the process. The continuous integration software that the Engineers should be acquainted with include: Jenkins, CruiseControl, CruiseControl.NET, Hudson, Bamboo, Urbancode’s Anthill Pro, ThoughtWorks’ Go, Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Jetbrains’ Team City. 4. Familiarity with Infrastructure Automation Tools & web languages Infrastructure automation is required as an integral part of the methodology and the agile processes to be implemented for any organization and for this reason, the DevOps engineers are also expected to be experienced with the Infrastructure Automation tools such as SaltStack, Ansible, Chef, Docker, Puppet and Windows PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, it is also preferred that the engineers are fluent with the use of the popular web languages such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP which are all the must-have skills for DevOps experts. DevOps organizations are on a constant lookout for engineers who have all the required tools and techniques in their arsenal with the right set of soft-skills along with an open-minded approach to fit in their evolving DevOps culture. Planning to implement DevOps to your business? Feel free to contact us and get all your queries resolved with our expert. Among all its service features, which one do you think makes your hosting company stand out? Is it the speed that you offer, the uptime that you maintain, the price that you propose or the outsourced technical support that you provide? As answered by a survey, all these are important precisely in that order! So, as you would’ve guessed it right, the speed and up-time you offer are the biggest deciding factors for your audience to choose you over your competition. Apart from this, at least one fifth of the respondents in the survey mentioned technical support to be their biggest deciding criteria for choosing the hosting company.
Regardless of where technical support stands among the selection criteria of your customers for choosing you, it is eventually what makes or breaks a deal. And once you know that technical support is critical to your business, you can appreciate what important it holds to hire industry experts as the technical support provider for your hosting business. So, here are the reasons why it is important for you in the first place: 1. Cost-effectiveness Building even a small in-house support team for 24/7 outsourced web hosting support can cost you an arm and a leg. So, it is any day a wiser decision to outsource technical support to proven industry experts rather than hiring a team and paying it for their round-the-clock services along with their specialized skill-set. This is not only convenient but also, quite affordable for your business. 2. Round-the-clock availability Not just their affordable price helps you effectively increase your bottom line, but it is their promise of a round-the-clock support, upon which you can conveniently base your hosting company’s promise of offering top quality support services without any interruption. And your business can avail this without having to maintain the extensive infrastructure and facilities required to maintain it. 3. Scalability While it can be tricky to scale-up or scale-down in case of your in-house support team where it leads to ‘hiring and firing’ of your employees, in case of outsourced hosting technical support, it is rather easy to scale. This is because your hosting business can leverage the flexible technical support packages offered by the industry experts to scale up or down as and when required which becomes more convenient for you in this case. 4. Improved growth focus & efficiency On opting for outsourcing technical support from industry experts, you can allocate your resources to focus on other more business-critical tasks that help you grow your business faster. So, this serves to bring in more efficiency & growth focus to your operations. This is because no more of your valuable time gets wasted in resolving at least the support related issues so that more critical issues can now be handled better. 5. Complete coverage for Holidays There are many online businesses for which holiday season holds special importance and therefore, good amount of coverage during this time is needed for them. Since hosting issues won’t wait to come up till the holidays get over, the contribution of your outsourcing partner towards providing coverage during holiday season matters a great deal. 6. Easy access to Industry Experts It is a lot easier to gain access to industry experts at affordable rates when you hire outsourcing technical support for your hosting business as compared to when you need to hire the domain experts on a full-time basis while building an in-house support team. So, unless you can spend extravagantly just on the technical support aspect of your hosting business, outsourcing offers you easy access to a vast talent pool in the industry. These are just a few key reasons why a hosting company should consider outsourcing technical support for their business and choose it over building an in-house support team. As your expert outsourcing partners offer top-class support to your customers it becomes easier for you to get an edge over your competition. So, it is important for you to carefully select your 24/7 web hosting technical support services provider partner. DevOps is fast getting adopted across organizations as one of the most popular ways to efficiently accomplish software deliveries and security updates. And this does not anymore remain confined to the client project deliveries but has also been implemented to the internal projects by most of these businesses. The very philosophy of DevOps lies in the speed, reliability and efficiency it imparts to your processes. This is enabled by inculcating a collaborative work environment with speedy and frequent releases and automation coupled with cloud based tool-set. The recent surge in the interest shown by most organizations for DevOps stems mainly from its beneficial aspects including development of high quality bugs-free products, high degree of innovation, one click-deployments and many more.
In short, DevOps lets you add more speed & reliability to your software delivery. Despite being cognizant of all its benefits, many organization still find it challenging to successfully implement this new method to their existing work-flow so as to reap its real benefits. This post is therefore, about some useful tips that can help your organization get a good head-start when it comes to implementing DevOps to your work-flow: 1. Take small steps to start & scale-up later Considering any organization’s innate resistance to change, it makes perfect sense to begin with taking small steps towards DevOps or implementing it at a rather small scale and later, moving forward with the scaling up process. This can prove to be effective if you are successful at getting positive results while starting on a small scale, whereas if we are to undertake it on a large scale right away, it can take longer & have more chances of failure owing to a variety of factors. So, instead of attempting to automate the processes from end-to-end, you can focus on smaller steps such as continuous integration or simply practicing frequent changes to small batch-size in a project. So, ideally a DevOps project should be started large enough to be able to solve something of significance – to get measurable results and small enough to manage the risks associated with it – for ensuring a successful – scoping the project right is the key here. 2. Experiment. Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat! It is not just DevOps that serves to bring in agility to your operations but the best practice is to add an element of agility to your DevOps implementation itself. The meaning thereby is that the organizations that are well-adapted to the culture of learning through experimentation and open to accepting and coping with the failures incidental to this process will have an edge over the others for successful implementation of DevOps. This is the reason why smaller organizations and start-ups typically find it easier to successfully adopt DevOps in their work culture as an integral part of it. Since DevOps requires you to calibrate and standardize various aspects such as which all tools may be required, the organization must get into the learning mode at all levels while implementing DevOps. So, it is more like you need to plan about what goal your business wants to achieve and then you start your journey to this goal and learn how to go, along the way! In this case, it helps if the bottlenecks are identified and discussed among the team early on – which may be the reason why you may need to hire the industry experts such as InstaCarma to handhold you. 3. Build flexibility & the accommodation for failure The organizations need to build the ability to accommodate failures rather than just doing away with the possibilities of failures. With all the experimentation required as a part of rolling out this new technology and with all the trial and error, failures are bound to be encountered. So, if the organization is ready with the mindset to accommodate those failures, it is ready to welcome the DevOps culture with open arms. So, DevOps requires the change management process of your organization to become more scalable, decentralized and compatible with your teams’ understanding as to how to respond as you move ahead. 4. Take your team along as you plan & move ahead A successful DevOps implementation requires you to take everyone in your organizational hierarchy along as you move ahead. This requires you to study and analyze the motivation level of every individual contributor for working in a cross-team collaborative environments and, how reward & incentivize them to reinforce the desired behaviors in them. Buying in people matters even more in the service industry where it is not just the running of database, infrastructure or the network matters but what matters here is the running of the database that can help the development teams deliver real value. So, the desired outcome of the entire exercise is the continuous delivery of qualitative software. 5. Inculcate the culture of ‘no blame on anyone’ As you embark on your DevOps journey, you must adopt an organizational culture of ‘no blame on anyone’. So, when an issue arises the focus ought to be around ‘what’ went wrong and not on ‘who’ did it wrong. The foundation of DevOps lies in creation of mutually trusting and collaborative environment which is just not possible with a ‘blaming’ and ‘punishing’ mindset. So, focus on positive reinforcement of the desired behavior rather than negative. This will help you achieve a work culture where you can do away with the organizational and information silos. With a more solution-oriented approach, the setbacks can be managed more effectively without the need to put the blame on people. As an organization setting its initial steps in the world of DevOps, these are some of the basics you can follow. Adoption of DevOps is going to be a ‘learn-as-you-go’ process for your business regardless of its industry type and size. This is the reason why having experienced DevOps professionals to handhold you through the process helps you identify the possible glitches better and ensure that your organization can successfully adopt to this new & effective method of software delivery. In times when the DevOps movement is in its full swing specially across the IT organizations, the way IT professionals view it is rather scattered and therefore the need to have a single view combining all aspects of DevOps is felt. Contrary to the popular belief, DevOps is not just confined to Development and operations but its scope is rather wide. To get an all-encompassing view of it and develop a better understanding of its scope, this article is an attempt to cover the key elements of DevOps.
Key elements of DevOps: 1. Customers The first and foremost element of DevOps enablement is the customer for any organization. The first step is to understand the need of a customer to work out the solution that perfectly fits the bill for this need. Customer feedbacks are therefore instrumental in driving your DevOps movement. Hence, with the right strategy in place only can an organization get an insight into a 360-degree view of how its customer-facing systems are performing in terms of delivering business value to the customers. It also gives an insight into the consumer behavior based on which the organization can perform its ‘what-if’ analyses to mold its marketing and sales strategy accordingly. With the agile method of DevOps, the organizations are now quicker at responding to the market needs. 2. Business While it may be important to implement DevOps for every organization regardless of its type and size, each organization is unique and so is its need to implement DevOps. So, your DevOps Implementation Service provider would design unique strategy tailored to cater to your exact needs. And before that, the business needs to consider whether an end-to-end implementation is required to meet their goals in the first place. If we take the analogy of a vehicle, while DevOps acts as a fuel to drive the lean practices in IT, the key to it is the organizational values and culture and the developmental methodology acts as its driver. With this example, it is rather easy to understand that making the right choice of fuel (DevOps Strategy) is critical to achieving top performance for your business operations. Just the way not every fuel can work with every vehicle, the businesses need to design the right blend of strategy to optimize their performance. 3. Development DevOps serves to automate the tedious and manually accomplished tasks pertaining to build and deployment to let the developers focus on their key skills and make the most of those in adding to the productivity of the organization. While the developers enrich the organizations with the right set of tools and techniques, this adds value in terms of embedding good practices and processes to make the lives of the developers easier and make the entire process of development more efficient. 4. Operations DevOps has been popular for its role as a bridge or an interface between the development and IT operations departments of an organization where it ensures that the two work closely, eliminating any scope for conflict between the two departments. DevOps culture encourages that any system is evaluated by both simultaneously for its scope and the impact of the changes planned leading to continuous development and improvement in the processes with a real-time evaluation. There has been growing consensus on the concept of this technique and all the above aspects taken together, impart a single-view of 360° DevOps. By implementing DevOps strategy that is the best-suited to your organization, the possibility and scope of organizational growth is immense. No wonder why it has been generating a lot of buzz in the market lately. There can be two use-case scenarios for DevOps implementation – it is either implemented by setting-up a strategy from the scratch as an integral part of the business strategy, when you are starting up a new business or it is implemented to the established organizations wherein the business needs to consider its transition to a new model of working, after a detailed study and analysis of the existing systems. By focusing on the key factors and constraints in both the cases, DevOps can be implemented keeping its 360° view in mind and your business can forge ahead into its journey towards lean practices in IT. One of the 3 major categories of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a service (SaaS), SaaS is a model of software delivery and distribution wherein a provider is responsible to host and manage your application and make it available to the end-users over Internet. To achieve successful SaaS implementation to your business infrastructure, here are some of the steps your business MUST take:
1. Understand the ‘why’ of implementing SaaS Understanding the ‘why’ of implementing SaaS to your business infrastructure will help you arrive at the ‘how’ of it rather more efficiently. There can be several reasons to implement SaaS for your business, ranging from improving the operational efficiency, to being able to focus better on the core business activities but the starting point for a business should be to understand this purpose clearly. In addition to this, a clear understanding of how the existing systems work, also help a business implement SaaS to their existing system easily. 2. Understand the prerequisites to achieve this reason for implementing SaaS Once the purpose of SaaS implementation is known, the prerequisites of achieving this purpose can be achieved. This is like going into further details of ‘exactly what features their software should possess’ and ‘what all functions it should be enabled to perform in order to achieve its very purpose’. By answering these questions, a business can figure exactly what kind of SaaS service or solution it needs to implement. 3. Enter a Service Level Agreement before signing the contract Entering a Service Level Agreement helps you clearly define the scope of SaaS implementation services offered by your provider and the exact nature of association between your provider and your business along with the consequences of all possible situations to avoid any potential issues related to the service delivery once you have signed the contract. Source With every web hosting services provider claiming to be the “best” & the “most trust-worthy” in market, it is becoming harder for hosting businesses like yours to trust their blatant claims. Without adequate exposure & experience with hiring or outsourcing web hosting support, you are likely to fall into the trap of the seemingly great providers, who make inefficient deliveries to your outsourcing needs. To prevent this from happening, here are a few points that you must consider before choosing your outsourcing partner for web hosting technical support:
Efficient communication & services This could be a good starting point as when a web hosting support services provider is not able to communicate efficiently and timely during the initial work discussions, you can not really expect them to exhibit that expected efficiency during support related client communication after you have hired them. So, it is a good idea to start observing and evaluating your provider as you start to discuss – whether they respond clearly and or time or not. Infrastructure to support your business needs Before even shortlisting them, you must ensure that your potential provider has adequately good infrastructure to be able to manage your business needs efficiently. This should be the starting point of your discussion and information gathering process, when it comes to hiring your web hosting outsourcing partner. Safety of office-spaces to ensure Data Security The next thing you need to make sure of is your potential providers’ efforts at ensuring security to prevent any kind of data theft. For this you must see to it that along with a secured infrastructure, secured entry points to ensure a secured access to the facility must be present at the office premises of the provider. Resource As a representative of a more collaborative method of software development, DevOps service underscores the mutual dependence of software development and the operational aspects of a project along with its quality assurance. As you come to know about DevOps, there can be several questions that come to your mind. Does your organization need DevOps? If yes, why? In what all ways will it help improve your business processes? Once you’re convinced to implement it to your business, you’ll want to know what structural changes will you need to make to your organization. What place to assign to the DevOps teams in your organizational structure? And so on. This article is an endeavor to address to all such queries that you might have.
The truth about DevOps is that you do not need it to simply get rid of the poor team collaboration in your business. It is not confined to an industry in particular. And in order to implement agile technology to your software development, it is not necessary to implement DevOps to your business infrastructure. Also, it is true that implementation of DevOps results in improved collaboration between application development and operations teams which is a consequence of removing the challenges of this interaction to make the implementation smooth. In order to ensure positive returns on the time and money invested in adopting DevOps for your organization, you should make sure of a few key things: 1) Ascertain your expectations out of the DevOps implementation for your organization More than just a generic solution to the collaboration needs of your development and operation teams, DevOps implementation should serve to identify points in the software development life-cycle where the team collaboration can maximize value creation. This is the very reason why implementation of DevOps needs to be tailored to a particular organization’s needs and it is like ‘not one size can fit all’. For example: DevOps can be applicable in cases of a wide variety of requirements such as availing architectural guidance, interfacing between the applications and infrastructural operations, implementing change management and so on. So, before implementing DevOps to your organization, there should be a clear understanding of the business objectives to be achieved out of it. 2) Clearly demarcate the role and responsibilities of your DevOps teams The role and responsibilities traditionally assigned across your IT teams need to be reassigned for achieving improved collaborative environment by means of DevOps implementation. The need for DevOps to make decisions involving infrastructure and applications requires you to clearly demarcate the scope of responsibilities of your DevOps teams & align its goals with the project goals to avoid any conflicts amidst high pressure situations of IT operations which can kill the sole purpose of DevOps implementation. 3) List out the skills gap required to achieve DevOps implementation One of the biggest hurdle in the way of implementing DevOps to any organization is the skills gap or the staff constraints that can come in the way of DevOps adoption. It is therefore required for you to first establish clear understanding of all the skills required to adopting the DevOps model of your interest. This is when you also need to list out all the gaps and constraints in the availability of those skills in your teams. One way is to train the teams to equip them with full-stack capabilities across operations and another is to build teams with members specializing at different and complementary skill-set to work in close coordination. Having said this, the biggest challenge to be encountered while adopting DevOps is the resistance from the staff to such major process change in the organization. This needs to be managed by working at grass-root level to eliminate this resistance to change. An efficient DevOps team ensures that is doesn’t remain confined to being just one more part of your IT department that faces hindrance from the operations and development teams. As your DevOps Services Implementation partners, we help you ensure building such efficient DevOps teams within your organization. Visit our Portfolio for more information about the services we offer. Among all its service features, which one do you think makes your hosting company stand out? Is it the speed that you offer, the uptime that you maintain, the price that you propose or the outsourced technical support that you provide? As answered by a survey, all these are important precisely in that order! So, as you would’ve guessed it right, the speed and up-time you offer are the biggest deciding factors for your audience to choose you over your competition. Apart from this, at least one fifth of the respondents in the survey mentioned technical support to be their biggest deciding criteria for choosing the hosting company.
Regardless of where technical support stands among the selection criteria of your customers for choosing you, it is eventually what makes or breaks a deal. And once you know that technical support is critical to your business, you can appreciate what important it holds to hire industry experts as the technical support provider for your hosting business. So, here are the reasons why it is important for you in the first place: http://www.instacarma.com/blog/outsourced-technical-support/ |
AuthorInstacarma offers seamless, Reliable and cost effective outsourced web hosting support, Datacenter services, Cloud migration services & helpdesk support to web hosting companies around the globe. Archives
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