Reseller Hosting allows you to host multiple websites which in most cases is impossible with regular Shared Hosting; most Reseller Hosting packages also allow you to create separate sub-user accounts for each website allowing you in effect to resell your assigned web space onto your clients – reseller hosting is seen as the starting point for web hosts. Getting started with reseller hosting can be a complicated task because of the many factors which you have to take into consideration when planning your web hosting business. Most webmasters and website designers would like to setup their own hosting business because of the appeal that it could have to their existing customer base, but don’t have the necessary skills to administer a dedicated server; this is the audience which reseller hosting is designed for – it allows you to host multiple websites for multiple clients, yet the administration of the hosting server is normally taken care of by the web host itself. To get started with your reseller hosting package, you need to make sure that you have a billing package of some sort and are able to receive support requests via any form of communication, whether it be phone or email; you also need to have your own active website so that the general public are able to find your web hosting plans, and purchase them if they find that they suite their needs. Once those two pre-requisites have been checked and complete, you can get on with starting out with your reseller package.

Where to Start

In general, your main starting point for getting starting with your reseller hosting package should be organising packages so that your web space can be divided up and sold on to clients; this process can be a lengthy one since you have to take into account the space and bandwidth that you have been provided as well as the likely needs of your clients. As well as the specifications of your web hosting packages, you should think about the different features which are provided such as an auto-script installer or a statistics tracking system. You will need to remember that all your clients have different needs, and you will most likely have people coming to you asking for custom hosting quotes – this is something which you should train prepare yourself for so that you quote the right price. You will also need to work out different pricing scenarios so that at the end of the day the prices you charge are making you a profit so that you can continue to pay for your reseller package but also have some money which you can keep for yourself as well as an amount which you can then invest back into your venture so that you can upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server when the time comes; working out the pricing structure of your business is critical to your success, because setting your prices too low can result in little to no profit leaving you out of pocket and could result in the business failing altogether.

Your Website

Your website is the first thing your customers see before they order any of your hosting packages; it is for this reason that it is important that you make it look as good as possible and that you use it to show case your hosting packages and any other products or services that you wish to sell. As well as having a good looking website, you should also make sure that all the text on the site is free from spelling errors and is readable as well as grammatically correct. Your website should be the place where your TOS, AUP and privacy policy are located so that they can be viewed by both current and prospective customers. SEO and link backs should also be used to ensure that your website receives the highest Google PageRank available and to ensure that it gets ranked high within search results - both of which can lead to increased custom.

Selling Domains

Selling domains can give your web hosting business a big boost and will definitely help you to make the most out of your reseller package, the main reason being that you can make a large profit out of selling domains alone. To begin selling domains, you must first sign up with a reseller registrar such as eNom or DirectI; eNom accounts are pricey but you can normally get a free one through your web host, DirectI accounts on the other hand are completely free. Once you have chosen a reseller registrar, you should then move on to choosing a billing package which can then register the domains for you.

Billing Software

Once you have your hosting packages and prices sorted, you will need to choose a billing package so that you can bill your web hosting customers as well as manage them with ease; there are many different web host billing systems on the market so choosing the right one can be difficult. You should always make an informed choice when choosing your billing software, meaning that you should always read reviews of the software which you are thinking of buying over at forums such as Web Hosting Talk, and also on the testimonials section of the software vendor’s forums. Things which you should take into consideration when looking around for a billing package include whether the package supports the control panel you are using, the domain registrar gateway you are using and what payment gateways are supported by the package; these 3 factors are the most important because you want to make sure that you are able to interact with your server from the package so that tasks such as auto-setup will run, registering domains is also something that most billing packages do so you must make sure that the one you choose supports the domain gateway which you are planning on using. Considering the available payment gateways within the package is important as well since you want to be able to receive payments from your customers online.

Legal Documents

Any hosting business, whether it is large or small, has several publicly-viewable legal documents accessible at all times; all clients agree to them whilst signing up for a hosting plan. These documents are known as TOS (Terms of Service), AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy) and then the standard privacy policy which nearly every business carries. A TOS normally consists of the full terms of the business including issues related to billing, support and ownership of the contents of websites as well as the minimum age a customer must be; AUPs normally consist of information to how a customer may use their allocated web space, the detailed information normally covers issues such as server overloading, the hosting of illegal content, the hosting of adult content and bandwidth overages; the privacy policy should consist of a description of what information is collected when a visitor visits your website and whether the information is passed on to third parties, and if that is the case then the third parties should also be stated – the sharing of information section should also be extended to cover information which is entered on the purchase of a domain or web hosting package. It is always good practice to have the three listed legal documents in place and easily viewable by anyone because it can give the customer assurance as well as giving you as a business something to fall back on or to refer to if a customer is no longer wanted because of reasons which you should always state within your TOS and AUP.

Conclusion

With the use of affordable web hosting packages along with a website where SEO has been applied in an effective way with an appealing design, you should receive a good amount of visitors which should lead to a good amount of custom at your benefit. Also, with the implementation of reselling domains and other services you should build a solid hosting business; all of these factors added together will help you make the host of your reseller package.

Designing in plain old HTML is a thing of the past, if you use HTML for designing, you probably design using tables (at least once) and using blank GIFs for positioning layouts. This is a bad way for designing in the world wide web in today’s standards, as in reality it wastes disk space and monthly bandwidth. This is because to do simple things in HTML, it would require a large amount of code. HTML wasn’t really originally created for styling content; it was invented all those years back for structuring content (well that was the case at first). After a few years people started demanding new features and typically company giants such as Netscape and Microsoft added new tags for structural as well as styling purposes. These unlocked new features and Webmasters had more freedom to create good-looking Web templates. However, not everything came out as expected; Webmasters started using tables for creating layouts, and their original invention was for tabular content/data only.

Then came a small nifty fellow called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short); it is the new generation for styling in Web pages. Since the 21st century it has been better known throughout the Web and more people are switching to CSS for styling Web pages. Now you’re probably wondering - what can CSS offer that HTML can’t? Well, simply put, it can offer loads of advantages and I can personally say it is incredibily easy to learn. CSS actually has more styling features and possibilities than plain old HTML, and even more it saves bandwidth!

Just to put your mind at rest - I can safely say it is much, much easier to design Web templates in CSS than ordinary HTML. This is because CSS has a nifty feature called margins, paddings, width and height. The margin is typically used to set the space around elements. For example if you put: margin-left: 50px - this would put an invisible space 50 pixels to the left (like if you used a transparent GIF 50 pixels in width). The padding is used for the space around the border, same as the margin, but it is the space around an element inside the border. For example if you had a box with a border and you put the following CSS code in: padding-left: 10px - there would be an invisible space to the left inside the border. The width and height is pretty self-explanatory, which defines the “size” of such element. Let me remind you an element is the HTML tag you wish to define.

That’s not all in CSS - there are plenty of other things CSS can do - such as changing the way links behave, for instance when they are hovered over by the cursor, or when they have been visited. As well as other complementary features such as changing font, colour and size as well as make all text in a specific element stay capitalized or lower-cased regardless of the circumstance. There is also one feature that I like a lot - which is called font-variant, which makes the text all capitalized (or small-capped).

Lastly, you’re probably wondering how it could save bandwidth, well the answer is pretty simple; if you use CSS to style elements in HTML, then there’s absolutely no need to use HTML styling, except the structural HTML tags (for example the paragraph or heading tag).

So now you’ve learnt quite a lot in CSS and I think you are ready to explore options for learning CSS. Not to worry - there are plenty of online tutorials such as w3Schools.com and HTML.net and within an hour or two, you’ll be wizzing away in CSS. Don’t forget, Google is your friend; search on Google.com for CSS tutorials as Google is the best way to find resources online.

The big question many people ask is why is it such a bad idea to use wysiwyg editors? This article will go through everything from the ground-up and soon you’ll realize why wysiwyg editors are not the solution to designing Web pages.

First of all, a wysiwyg editor is an illustrative editor for those who want to make Web pages quickly and effectively without needing knowledge in HTML. Well first of all, they aren’t that effective at all, all editors alike are restricted to what it can do - wysiwyg editors don’t have every feature built in. And besides, HTML is not the best way to styling Web pages nowadays.

If you don’t know HTML and you use these types of editors, you’ll find they are well certainly useful and handy, but it is quite hard to learn the HTML code it generates, and actually most editors force you to create Web templates in tables.

Another clear example is some editors do not comply to XHTML standards. I’m not going to go through XHTML in detail, but in the simplistic detail, it is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML. You may find rendering errors in some browsers from the code you receive from such an editor, and if you don’t have knowledge in HTML, there’s not much you can do to rectify the error.

The best way is knowing HTML, and creating the Web templates from a plain editor such as Notepad for Windows or possibly Notepad++, which is a useful tool for Webmasters as it makes HTML colour-coded so you know what is what, and when you have done something wrong.

If you wish to create basic and simple designs without needing the fuss of knowing HTML, you are better off with such a wysiwyg editor; although they aren’t that useful in the overall comparison. If you have a bit of patience and are willing to create templates and Web pages with more freedom and with less errors in browsers, you should learn HTML. Below is a reference to some Website resources and tutorials on HTML, or alternatively you could check eBay and Amazon for some cheap books on HTML (perferably HTML version 4).

Resources & Tutorials:

• W3Schools

• HTML.NET

• Echoecho.com

• LissaExplains.com

AWStats is open source (General Public License) tool that generate advanced web streaming, ftp or mail server statistics in graphical form. This log analyzer which works as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or from command line and shows all information of log contains, in graphical web pages.

It uses a partial information file to process large log files, frequently and rapidly. It can investigate log files from all major server tools like Apache log files, WebStar, IIS and a many other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

Features of AWStats

• Number of visits and number of unique visitors, visits duration and last visits.
• Authenticated users and last authenticated visits
• Pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week
• Domains/countries of hosts visitors
• Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list
• Most viewed, entry and exit pages
• Files type
• Web compression statistics for mod_gzip or mod_deflate
• OS used
• Browsers used
• Visits of robots
• Worms attacks
• Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site
• HTTP errors
• Other personalized reports based on URL, URL parameters, referrer field for miscellaneous/marketing purpose
• Number of times your site is “added to favourites bookmarks”.
• Ratio of Browsers with support of: Java, Flash, RealG2 reader, Quicktime reader
• WMA reader, PDF reader
• Cluster report for load balanced servers ratio.

A Denial-of-Service attack ((D)DoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource occupied to its planned users. Although the aim of a (D)DoS attack may vary, it generally comprises the concentrated, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

(D)DoS attackers typically object sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers and even DNS root servers.

Generally attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so that it cannot respond to genuine traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. (D)DoS attacks are considered violations of the IAB’s Internet proper use policy. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.

Ways of (D)DoS attacks

• Forcing the attacked computer to reset or consume its resources such that it can not provide its proposed service
• Restricting the communication media between the planned users and the targeted user so that they can no longer be in touch.

Symptoms of (D)DoS attacks

• Unusually slow network performance
• Unavailability of a particular web site
• Failure to access any web site
• Remarkable increase in the number of spam emails received

Methods of attack

• Flooding a network, thereby preventing legitimate network traffic
• Disturbing a server by sending more requests than it can possibly handle, thereby preventing access to a service
• Put a stop to a particular individual from accessing a service
• Disturbing service to a specific system or person.

Attacks can be heading for any network device, including attacks on routing devices and Web, electronic mail, or Domain Name System servers.

Basic types of attack

• Using up computational resources such as bandwidth, disk space or CPU time
• Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information
• Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions
• Disruption of physical network components.
• Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

DoS attacks are intended to

• Crest the CPU’s usage, put off any work from occurring
• Generate errors in the microcode of the machine
• Generate errors in the sequencing of commands, so as to force the computer into an unbalanced state or lock-up
• Exploits errors in the operating system to consume all available amenities so no real work can be accomplished
• Crash the operating system itself
• iFrame (D)DoS, in which a html document is made to visit a webpage with many KB’s of information many times, until they achieve the amount of visits to where bandwidth limit is exceeded.

Prevention and response

Surviving attacks

The easiest way to tackle (D)DoS attack is to prepare for the attack. Separate emergency chunks of IP addresses for critical servers with a separate route can be helpful.

The exploratory process should begin instantaneously after the (D)DoS attack begins.

A separate route is not that exaggerated and it can be used for load balancing or sharing under normal circumstances and switched to emergency mode in the event of an attack.

SYN Cookies

SYN cookies modify the TCP protocol management of the server by delaying sharing of resources until the client address has been confirmed. It is considered as most potent defense against SYN attacks. There are Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux implementations for (D)DoS attacks, in which FreeBSD and Linux implementations start during runtime of the kernel.

Firewalls

Firewalls have simple rules such as to allow or deny protocols, ports or IP addresses. Firewalls cannot prevent some (D)DoS attacks, as they are too complex and they cannot differentiate good traffic from (D)DoS attack traffic. Firewalls are too deep in the network hierarchy, before that router may be affected.

Firewalls can effectively avoid users from initiation simple flooding type attacks from machines behind the firewall.

Routers

Routers have some rate-limiting and ACL capability and they can be manually set. Most routers can be easily besieged under (D)DoS attack. If you enquire flow statistics out of the router during the (D)DoS attacks, they further slow down and make matter more difficult. Cisco IOS has features which prevents flooding.

Application front end hardware

Application front end hardware is used on networks in combination with routers and switches, before traffic reaches the servers. This hardware examines data packets as they go into the system, and then categorized them as priority, regular, or dangerous. Hardware speeding up is key to bandwidth management and there are more than 25 bandwidth management vendors. While going for granularity of bandwidth management, hardware speeding up, and automation while selecting an appliance.

IPS based prevention

Intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) are efficient if the attacks have signatures linked with them. IPSs work on content identification cannot block behavior based (D)DoS attacks.

An ASIC based IPS can notice and obstruct (D)DoS attacks because they have the processing power and the granularity to analyze the attacks and act like a circuit breaker automatically.

A rate-based IPS (RBIPS) must investigate traffic granularly and constantly monitor the traffic pattern and determine if there is traffic irregularity. It must let the genuine traffic stream while blocking the (D)DoS attack traffic.

The most important thing that you must do with any server, whatever operating system it is, is to make sure that it is secure and that it can’t be compromised in any way. This is relatively easy with Windows since there are default firewalls built in, and anti-virus is widely available; however, with Linux there are no default firewalls as such, but a wide variety of open source ones that you can choose from - in this article we will be focussing on the most common one which is known as ‘CSF’. There are no viruses as such for Linux, but hackers create malicious codes for Linux machines known as ‘RootKits’ which can cause damage to a Linux machine and are almost impossible to get rid of without a system reload; we will also be focussing on a tool for hunting out root kits known as ‘RootKit Hunter’.

CSF (Config Server)

CSF is a freely available firewall for Linux which can be configured exactly as you want it to be. It has web interfaces for both WHM and Webmin meaning that you are able to control it from any location where you have access to the internet. CSF is fairly easy to install; all you have to do is follow these steps:

1) Download the CSF tarball from: http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz using the ‘wget’ command.

2) Unpack the tarball by running ‘tar -xvzf csf.tgz’.

3) Check that you have all the necessary components on your box, then move yourself to the CSF directory by running ‘cd csf’.

4) Run ’sh install.sh’ and CSF will be installed!

After that all you need to do is edit the CSF config file which is located at ‘/etc/csf.conf’; you will need to add all the ports that you want open and change the ‘testing value’ to ‘0′ so that CSF is run productively.

By using a firewall such as CSF vulnerable ports which could be used to compromise your server are blocked meaning that the your server is of the highest security; requests to such ports will be blocked, and multiple requests to open ports which result in several failures of one type or another will lead to the source IP address being blocked. It is reccommended that you use one of the web interfaces to manage CSF if you do not have the necessary technical knowledge as you could end up being locked out of your server if you do something wrong with CSF.

Rootkit Hunter

Rootkits can be very hard to detect on a Linux machine, and by the time that you have discovered that a rootkit is harvesting itself on your box it will be too late. However, it will never be too late if you have Rootkit Hunter installed on your machine and scheduled to run at a certain time each day - any rootkits found will then be logged and emailed to you, so that you can then take action as appropriate. To install Rootkit Hunter, follow these instructions:

1) Download the latest version of Rookit Hunter from http://www.rootkit.nl/.

2) Unpack the tarball by running ‘tar -xvzf rootkithunter-version.tar.gz’.

3) Move yourself to the Rootkit Hunter directory by running ‘cd rootkithunterdirectory’.

4) Run the installation file: ’sh install.sh’.

That’s it - RootKit Hunter is installed! You can then use custom scripts and cron jobs to configure and schedule Rootkit Hunter as you want. Rootkit Hunter is just a searcher for Rootkits and doesn’t remove the malicious piece of software. In order to remove most Rookits, the operating system will need to be reloaded - in most cases.