reseller-web-hosting

Unveiling the Power of Reseller Web Hosting

In the dynamic realm of web hosting, reseller hosting has emerged as a potent solution, offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to carve their niche in the ever-expanding digital landscape. This unique hosting model allows individuals to purchase hosting resources in bulk and then redistribute them to clients, effectively becoming intermediaries between hosting providers like GlowHost, and their end-user customers. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the intricacies of reseller hosting, exploring its benefits, functionalities, and how it empowers individuals to thrive in the competitive online business world.

Understanding Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting serves as a bridge between hosting providers and small businesses or individuals seeking an online presence. Unlike traditional hosting plans, reseller web hosting allows entrepreneurs to lease server space and resources, such as bandwidth and storage, from a hosting provider. The reseller, in turn, can divide and sell these resources to multiple clients as separate hosting packages.

The Key Advantages

1. Cost-Efficiency:

Reseller hosting provides a cost-effective entry point for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to establish their web hosting business without the hefty initial investment required to manage and maintain physical servers.

2. Streamlined Management:

With reseller hosting, individuals can focus solely on customer relations, marketing, and brand-building, as the hosting provider takes care of server maintenance, security, and infrastructure management.

3. Scalability:

As the reseller’s business grows, scaling up becomes a seamless process. Hosting providers often offer flexible plans, allowing resellers to upgrade their resources as demand increases, ensuring a smooth transition and consistent service quality.

How Reseller Hosting Works

  1. Purchase Reseller Plan: Resellers start by selecting a reseller hosting plan from a hosting provider like GlowHost. These plans typically include a set amount of server resources that can be allocated among multiple clients.
  2. Create Hosting Packages: Resellers can then create customized hosting packages, defining the resource allocation, features, and pricing for each package. This flexibility enables resellers to cater to a diverse range of clients with varying needs.
  3. Client Onboarding: With hosting packages in place, resellers can start onboarding clients. They become the primary point of contact for their customers, handling billing, support, and any other customer-related issues.
  4. Backend Management: While the hosting provider manages the backend infrastructure, the reseller has access to a control panel to monitor and manage their clients’ hosting accounts. This includes tasks such as setting up email accounts, managing domains, and more.

Empowering Entrepreneurs

Reseller hosting empowers entrepreneurs by offering a low-risk and low-cost entry into the hosting industry. It allows individuals to establish their brand, build a customer base, and generate revenue without the technical complexities associated with server management. This model fosters entrepreneurship, encouraging innovation and competition in the web hosting sector.

In conclusion, reseller hosting is a powerful tool for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking a foothold in the competitive digital landscape. With its cost-efficiency, scalability, and streamlined management, reseller hosting opens doors for individuals to venture into the hosting business, providing a win-win scenario for both resellers and their clients in the ever-evolving online world.

Check out reseller hosting plans from GlowHost today.

How to Setup a WordPress Staging Website

For WordPress developers, WordPress staging has become an integral step while performing updates, installing plugins, and testing new features and major changes without causing errors on live sites. The common practice of WordPress staging is the act of working on a clone of the website, and pushing functional changes to the active website.

There are a variety of ways to stage WordPress websites, but one of the simplest methods anyone new to WordPress could learn themselves is by using a new feature in Softaculous called WordPress Staging. This is available with every hosting account at GlowHost. We’re also offering a special on our WordPress hosting right now!

Create a WordPress Staging Website

With Softaculous’s WordPress Staging feature, it’s surprisingly easy to stage your website. It all starts within Softaculous, in your WordPress installations overview.

To start staging your WordPress website, go to all of your active installations from within Softaculous. On this page, click the very first icon adjacent to your website to begin staging.

This will be very similar to when you were installing WordPress, except this time you will not be setting a password. This process will produce an exact copy of the existing website.

Once you have your staging environment setup for WordPress, you may begin using this to test new plugins, run updates, and undergo your science experiments without fear of losing the hard work you’ve already put into the live site.

For a complete explanation on staging a WordPress website in Softaculous, visit our article, How to Stage a WordPress Website Using Softaculous in our knowledge base. While the process is simple, our knowledge base will go into even more information and cover all options available.

Staging Vs. Production Sites

While there are many stages in the inception of any website, staging and production often last longer than other phases of development. The two are closely related, and the real difference between them come down to who may access them.

Production Website: The final version of your website which your visitors will see and interact with is referred to as the production website. This version will showcase the hard work and development that went into the website, and should be error free and contain no bugs in the live environment.

Staging Website: Before reaching live production, the staging website acts as the testing environment to ensure all of your website’s functionality works as expected.  Although all functionality should be complete after development, staging provides an opportunity for final quality checks in a natural state. This is in comparison with making changes to the live site.

Who Needs a WordPress Staging Website?

In a perfect world, everyone would be staging their websites to mitigate any potential risks of changes. Let’s face it, there’s always a risk in updating code.

To be more realistic, anyone running a moderate sized operation should be staging their websites. Updating your website could render it unusable, and leave you with the dreaded WSOD (White Screen of Death). If you’re confident that your updates will not result in any negative impacts, then you probably don’t need to do any WordPress staging.

Below are some questions you should ask yourself.

  • Does your website generate a sizable amount of your income?
  • Do people rely on your website for services or information?
  • Do you have outdated backups, or none at all?
  • Would you not be able to recover easily should an update fail?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, then you should maintain a WordPress staging website.

WordPress Staging Benefits

WordPress staging addresses the risks involved with development performed on a live site. This results in time and money saved which would otherwise be spent if you had to take your website down for development or to fix errors.

Some benefits of WordPress staging can be found below. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

  • Catch errors and non-functional features before they reach the live site.
  • Test new plugins and code without impacting existing website users.
  • Prevents downtime due to time spent fixing mistakes.
  • Perform updates without onlookers or unexpected traffic during tests.
  • Hides pages from search engines, preventing accidental indexing.

With WordPress staging, you’re given more freedom and control over how features get implemented with fewer risks.

WordPress Staging Disadvantages

With any good practice perks, you have to take the good with the bad. Staging a WordPress website does have some drawbacks. Depending on your circumstances, the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks. Your decision to stage a WordPress website should be based on the value you receive versus the sacrifices you make.

  • Increased development and maintenance time.
  • May not always be identical copies of the active version.
  • An additional website to maintain in tandem with the production site.
  • Risk of search engines indexing the staging site if not secured properly.

Are you the only WordPress webmaster? Staging may not make sense to you. Do you have several hands committing code to your website? if so, then staging becomes important in tracking bugs and testing new features.

Other Ways to Stage a WordPress Website

The simplest method to staging a WordPress website  would be through Softaculous’s WordPress staging feature, however there are numerous ways to stage WordPress. Some methods will work better for specific cases.

  • WordPress Multi-site
  • WordPress cloning plugins
  • Manual copy of your files and database in another folder
  • Duplicating your files in an offline environment

Whichever methods you prefer to stage your website, you will be protecting your live WordPress website, and currently working plugins and themes.

WordPress Staging Considerations

Think about all the hard work you’ve already (or will) put into your WordPress website. Is it worth staging a second website to work on? How much time will you save from errors as opposed to time spent on working with a WordPress staging website? These are just a few questions you should ask yourself before considering WordPress staging. When a website is doing its job, it’s always advantageous to work on a copy instead of disrupting the integrity of an active website.

How do you tackle your WordPress updates and development? We’d love to hear from you! Leave us a comment below.