What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software
What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software
If you’re a small web host, and especially if you’re a web hosting reseller looking to grow your business, the number of tasks you have to handle will quickly become enough to overwhelm even the most organized person. You won’t be able to grow past a certain point without software to automate at least some functions. In this article, I’ll take a look at some of the parts of your business that can benefit from software automation.There are several areas that can be well served by web hosting software automation. These can be usefully divided into the front end and back end, or, more functionally, into the customer-facing software and the business processes. This does not mean that each set of tools operates in isolation; they communicate with each other to keep things running smoothly.
For example, let’s look at the simple process of billing. Billing software creates invoices and bills customers automatically. Proper billing software keeps track of who paid and who is overdue; it also tracks account usage, and can add the appropriate fees to clients who have used more than their allotted storage or bandwidth. But if you really want to score with your clients, you should also be able to warn them when they’re getting close to their limits, and let them proactively upgrade – or pay in advance through their own control panels. So billing software may seem to be mostly a back end business process, but it obviously has customer-facing elements that can’t be ignored.
Granting that these functions are tied together, let’s consider how web hosting automation is handled. Particularly if you’re a web hosting reseller, you may find it easiest to use control panel software. This software usually offers a GUI interface for both you and your customers, and allows for the handling of most problems and changes with a few clicks of a mouse. The best-known web hosting control panels include H-Sphere, produced by Positive Software (http://www.psoft.net/); Plesk, produced by SWSoft (http://www.swsoft.com/plesk/); and the nigh-ubiquitous cPanel, produced by cPanel (http://www.cpanel.net/index.html).
What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software – Business Functions
So what kinds of functions should you look for in a control panel? For openers, you need to make sure it works with your operating system and the OSes of your customers. cPanel, for instance, doesn’t yet support Windows, though it does handle many flavors of Linux and FreeBSD. Plesk supports both Windows and Linux, while H-Sphere supports Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.
Another point you might consider is ease of use. Lots of features are wonderful, but having too many of them can get to be confusing for both you and your customers. Obviously, you and your customers won’t be using the same control panel, but many companies (including the three I’ve mentioned) provide control panels for both the reseller and the customer. When you look at the control panels, consider the level of technical expertise of the people who are going to be using them, and strive to find the right balance between finely grained control and ease of use.
So what should be automated? Account creation is an obvious candidate. You will want some safeguards in place, though, to prevent spammers from taking advantage of this feature. Having your prospective customer type in a word that can’t be automatically read and typed in by a computer is one way an account creation program might protect against this.
There are also a number of administrative functions associated with account creation and account management. These include everything from creating packages, adding and suspending sites, modifying passwords, monitoring and logging bandwidth and disk space usage by account, parking domains for your customers, installing SSL certificates…the list goes on and on. A control panel should make these functions quick and relatively painless.
As I mentioned above, billing and invoice management is another function that a control panel should automate for you. Ideally, it should operate almost invisibly. Get this right and it’s hardly noticed; get this wrong, and it could easily cost you customers, to say nothing of the headaches you’ll suffer from complaints.
Credit card processing is closely related to this. Make sure that the control panel can handle not only your merchant gateway, but an assortment of them; after all, if you’re hosting ecommerce websites, you may not know what merchant gateway they’ll be using.
You will probably need to email your customers for all sorts of reasons, not just to send them bills or let them know they’re running over on their bandwidth. You may need to warn them about server maintenance, for instance. In that case, it helps if you can automate your email notifications.
You’re going to need some kind of help desk module. Any automation you can do here will probably speed things up and make your customers happier, assuming you can solve their problems in a timely fashion. Automated emails can help, but your customers will also want to know that there are real humans efficiently taking care of their problems.
While it may not be absolutely necessary to automate domain registration, it’s something that’s nice to have. If you have customers who want to register a lot of domain names, they’ll thank you for it. Check how well the control panel integrates with domain registrars. Even if you don’t have automated domain registration right away, you may find that you need some kind of domain management system.
What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software – The Customer Side
Your customers will probably want to manage their own accounts as much as they can. Think about it: would you want to be on the phone to your ISP for every little change? These can include simple matters like changing passwords, opening and closing email accounts, and more. Or, looked at from your point of view, do you really want to spend your time doing that kind of handholding? Of course you don’t. So here are some of the things you will want your customers to be able to do for themselves through their own control panels.
Let’s start with account management items that can be automated. Customers should be able to retrieve and change passwords in a secure way (why penalize someone for a faulty memory?). They should also be able to pay for their hosting plan; the easier it is for them to pay, the more likely it is that you won’t have to hassle them about it. Likewise, if any of your customer’s personal details changes (like phone numbers or postal addresses or such), you should not make it difficult for them to change those with you.
Other account management items customers should be able to do for themselves deal with the account itself. Make it easy for customers to upgrade or downgrade their hosting plans; cancel accounts; and add and drop web sites or plans that are attached to an existing account. Customers should receive confirmation emails when the changes they’ve requested have gone through.
Here I’d like to reiterate what I said in the previous section about account creation. Automating this process too much may become a security risk. Hackers can break into the system to open fraudulent accounts for distributing viruses and/or spam. So you do need some human oversight.
If you’re hosting online businesses, they’re going to be concerned with site statistics. If your customers are engaged in any kind of SEO, they’ll want to know how many hits they’re getting on each of their pages, how much time visitors are spending on their pages, where visitors are coming from – and especially if their visitors are coming from search engines, which engines and keywords they’re using.
Another item that falls under site management is something I’ve alluded to earlier in this article: a tool that lets customers know when they’re approaching their monthly bandwidth limits and maximum disk space. It’s a convenient feature that will keep your customers from being smacked with unpleasant surprises – and we all know an angry or unhappy customer can quickly become a former customer.
What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software – More Customer Management Features
We’re not done yet by a long shot. Many of your customers will have some kind of email address other than the one through their domain. Still, if you can provide them with a hosted email service that works as well as a desktop application, without the client side software, they’ll be more inclined to stay. That’s important in an industry in which customer loyalty is low to nonexistent. Especially if you’re pitching to businesses, your customers should be able to add, manage, and delete email addresses on their own.
A web site doesn’t really feel like it belongs to you if you can’t easily manage your files. Customers need a way to get them to your servers, and take down their own existing files. Make this as simple for your customers as you can and still maintain security; not everyone who puts together a web site is tech savvy, and they shouldn’t have to be.
Along the same lines, you might consider providing your customers with a simple HTML editor. Many web hosts don’t, but if you have a good one, you have a better chance of keeping your less technically-inclined customers happy. If you really want to get fancy, you can offer site builder wizards and web site templates that will get your customers well on the way to creating the site of their dreams with very little hassle. Some site builders include automated graphics tools, automated web blogs and forms, site navigation, style sheets, and much more.
Your customers may have database needs; especially in the case of ecommerce websites, they may need to manage their connectivity to a database, and even manage items in the database itself. Database tools vary a lot in price and capabilities. The kind of tool you offer your customers is going to depend very much on the market you’re targeting.
Again, if you’re targeting ecommerce websites, your customers will need ecommerce tools. They’ll need to be able manage their flow of goods through website transactions, and process credit card and PayPal payments. With this target market, having good ecommerce tools to offer your customers is not optional; it’s a must.
Finally, I’d like to address the issue of tech support. Sometimes you can set things up so that your customers are able to solve their problems without calling on you. If you can provide them with easy access to the kind of information they need to get things done, you’re making them more self sufficient – which is satisfying to both them and you. Aside from a good FAQ, good tutorials on the topics they’re most likely to need help with are a nice touch. When they do need to call on you for help, the more ways they have of reaching the person who can help them, the better. Email, live chat, and phone numbers should be available. After all, if you’ve automated everything properly, they’ll only be contacting you for the really important things that they can’t take care of themselves.
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What to Look for When Choosing Hosting Automation Software