Your hosting account is finally activated after a bit of research with great efforts. Now what? No matter if you have dealt with other hosting service, you must know about the right procedure to have everything running properly. Based our recent communication to several clients, we found it's necessary to write a dedicated posting about how to work correctly with your hosting account after setup. Because lots of issues are caused by misusing of the service. We have gathered all problems and compiled a list of following guidance

Check account settings

The first thing you should pay attention to after you received account confirmation email. In your client portal, there're lots of settings can be customized such as login protection and account renewal settings. From the problems we received, multiple clients complained their account got auto charged without any notice in advance. But after we checked from client portal, the account has auto renewal "turned on". We can say the hosting is doing bad, but if we have done further investigation, such problem can be avoided. So make sure to check your account settings once you received confirmation email.

Secure passwords for different service

By default, all service is created by hosting account login credentials. It's absolutely not good for overall security. Because if any of your service is cracked by hacker then your entire account is placed at high risk. We highly recommend to configure different passwords for different services. Client portal, hosting control panel and FTP etc should be provided different credentials. So once your hosting account is created, be sure to apply such settings and your account will be operated safely.

Be familiar with the control panel software

The hosting industry is being standalized from the past two years development reviews. However, there're still big difference among different hosting providers. For example the most popular control panel "cpanel" has many versions and lots of hosting companies applied their own custom setups. Justhost is probably the leading one who has fully revised the control panel software. By their most recent control panel customization, everything is provided on the same navigation just like a powerful cms platform. Customer center, support center and control panel are fully integrated and control panel category structures are all redesigned.

Because of this, there're many things to learn about. Don't be scared by the effort and time. It's 100% worthy because you will understand how to manage stuff professinoally. This is also included from hosting company new staff training cource, they must be professional in each single point before they can sent to customer support.

Upload website files and do testing

Now, you can upload or migrate over all files and do testing. Remember, it's always important to confirm everything is working properly before your switch over domain directly. Normally, each hosting account is assigned a termporary address for website testing. Use it to test everything on your website and solve any problem with support before the next changeover.

Sometimes, your application can only work under FQDN. For such case, you can by pass DNS directly from computer hosts file. For windows operation system, navigate to "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc" and open the "hosts" file via notepad then add this line in the end "10.10.10.x yourdomain.com". Make sure to replace the IP to your server IP and use your own domain name. Save the file and browse to it, it will bring up website from your new server. Remember to remove this configuration after your switched over DNS records.

Change over DNS server

Now it's time to change your domain DNS. Unless there's specific reason, we suggest change over the entire DNS server settings instead few DNS records. Because it's common for hosting companies do necessary maintenance on hosting server and they need to apply some changes every few periods. If we use their DNS server, then everything can be handled professionally by support team or else we must monitor such changes by ourselves.

Above guidance is solely written based our working experience on customer accounts. You probably have searched out the perfect hosting service, but it's another thing if you can use it properly. It's crucial to know how to use the service professionally and safely. This will greatly reduce lots of potential problems.

When problem occurs with our hosting service, the support team is our most reliable contact because they have full access to problem resources. But not all of us can communicate with technician properly based our support experience. We have to reply at least one time to understand what exact problem there is. We have generated the following suggestions & guidance on how to get support fastly and professionally.

Select the right support channel

Hosting companies always provide multiple support channels like online knowledge base, chat and ticket system. We must evaluate the kind of problem we encounter then determine the proper support contact. For example, if we have billing concerns, then there's no doubt we need to contact accounting department instead tech support or just send out a general inquiry. This will simply slow down the support experience.

Except for live person support, knowledge base actually be able to solve most common issues because its all provided by the support team experience. Some frequently asked questions like how to transfer domain and file uploading, there're great video tutorials, you don't need a technician at all.

Pick out the most important

As we know, most support technicians are pretty busy in fixing various problems every day. They don't have sufficient time to spend on every single case. Thus it's important to let technician understand the problem in quick time so they can do needful support. When referring to accounting issues, ownership verification is a MUST as always. So make sure you provide necessary verification for account changes.

Guide technician on how to produce problems

Some problems might be produced by a few steps guidance. We must provide the full steps to technician and possibly sample credentials will be needed. We supported  several clients who just screamed why service not working but refuse to provide us how to reproduce the problem. They just keep saying must be problems on server and show their profession in managing such service. We must understand we're not server administrator but regular user. If we don't provide necessary infomation to support team, they can do nothing.

Don't submit the same problem multiple times

Many clients submit multiple support requests under client area and hope to get faster fix. However, this does not speed up the process but simply bring confusion to technician. Your tickets might be handled by different technicians and if they work on the same case at the same time, it's easily to be crashed. For example when the first technician made a change on website configuration then reply to get further details, but later another technician made another change and still ask you to provide more information, they will be confused when they return to the problem. So never submit the same problem multple times, it helps nothing but just slows down the fixing process.

When problem occurs, don't worry. We need to make primary evaluation and find where the problem might be. Sometimes, we don't need to contact support at all. If we can do a little more research, we can find solutions easily from online resource. With our experience, many technicians search for support online and just provide guidance on how to fix problem by customers themselves.

2013 is passing away and 2014 is only few steps in the front. Here I would like to thanks all collegues and supporters to webhostpark project. You have contributed great efforts and ideas in bringing new blood to this website. We wish to make further coperation and better success in the next year. Here I would like to give a brief review of the last year and new plans in year 2014.

Web hosting company reviews

In 2013, we mainly focus on partner companies who have been sponsering our projects like InMotionHosting, Arvixe and WebhostingHub etc. We did further investigation and evaluation to most those providers. Especially for those companies who have been pretty active interacting with clients, we paid more attention to them and arranged direct interviews to their representatives. There would be a lot of changes to many providers in 2014 so large modification is expected on website.

Partners and coperation

There're total of 9 partnership requests and only 1 website approved by us for quality and efficiency guarantees. Since January to July, we accepted total of 20 guest articles for hosting service related. The direct result is our website page rank is promoted to PR4 by the late update. Such effort/coperation will be coninued in the coming year and we'll provide better user experience in using this website.

News update

We have been tracking web hosting news from different countries. From our analysis, US is still the biggest IT market and primary choice by most users(either novice or professional). Asia especially China got burst growth in the last year. Cloud service is widely provided by some IT giants like Alibaba and China Telecom. But based professional discussion in IT circle, their service will be hard to serve oversea clients because of the country policies.

Onsite support

We personally accepted around 50 live chat contacts from chat admin and over 80% people are looking for correct hosting plan selection. Most supports and communication are still handled by email since we can not always keep online. We'll try to be online as longer as possible on working days.

Plans for year 2014

Most works in 2014 are continued by current tasks. We'll keep on offering helpful guidance and in depth reviews to more companies. Further coperation to more hosting companies are expected. We'll also seek more partnership with other leading websites for better user interaction. Website redesign is scheduled and should happen in short periods.

In a word, we'll still do hard and publish useful information to support our visitors better. We hope you get fresh air by visiting here and earn better success.

Best regards
Kenny

If you're hosting a store site, most probably you will need a PCI compliant hosting service, but you might be surprised there's not a dedicated plan designed for this. What's required for PCI compliant and how to get the right service provider? We have done a bit research based the industry announcements and communication to multiple hosting experts. In this article we provide brief introduction of PCI compliance and basic guidance on how to choose the right hosting.

PCI Compliance Introduction

PCI is standardized throughout the payment processing industry under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). If you accept credit card payments, you must comply with the credit card associations and networks rules concerning data security and ensure the safety of cardholder data. Thus PCI compliance solely focus on data security. Since the payment process includes different parties, we must ensure the safety on each section includes the following:

• Hosting Server. The main and most crucial point for PCI compliant hosting service. Since it's the final place for storing all data, the hosting company must apply necessary security tactics as much as they can. So when we talk about PCI compliant hosting, it's more about hosting server security.
• Payment processing company. Means the payment gateway service on our website. Since we don't have control over this part, the service provider is fully responsible for maintaining their equipments and network. So for end users, it's crucial to choose a reputable gateway provider for guaranteed security.
• Our website. It refers to how we secure our online data and onsite data transition. Especially from product order page, this requires us to apply proper coding and encryption. SSL is a MUST according to PCI standards.
• Our company policy for data protection. Means how we protect those collected data such as customer profiles, card details and all stuff submited by clients. For example if we store these data on local computer, who and how will it be accessed is big concern by PCI DSS. Limited access and password protection is basic requirement.

How to make hosting server pci compliant?

Hosting servers are fully maintained by hosting company. In order to be PCI compliant, there're lots of stuff to be considered by hosting company including the choice of server hardwares, system OS, data center space, upstream bandwidth provider and firewall installation, Continuous server optimization and monitoring etc. In a word, it's a big challenge to configure a perfect PCI compliant hosting service.

The truth is every company tries to be as secure as possible while they must reduce the overall costs to be competitive on the market. Because of this, not too many hosting providers can offer quality PCI compliant plans. Especially for some small groups who have limited budget and totally rely on third party providers, you can't really tell how they're doing.

What to do on user end?

This is actually discussed in details from our shopping cart protection tips page. Nowadays, more and more people use available scripts for cart setup. The main problem is not everybody are programming friendly. Once your site is developped, you might just focus on business promotion and forget software updates/maintenance. If you're running a personal store site, it's highly suggested setup a schedule task for regular maintenance. Business is important, but web store health is also crucial since it's carrying our business.

Who provides quality PCI compliant hosting?

As server and network security is mostly concerned for PCI compliant hosting service, what we need is a well protected hosting plan. Idealy, hosting company with their own data center space is the best choice. It simple shows their tech and financial abilities in offerring high performance and secure hosting service. But that's not all we should pay attention to. Actually, sometimes the company policy is more important because you can always get someone for problem caring.

For quality PCI compliant hosting service, we highly recommend to check out InMotionHosting and Arvixe Business web hosting plans. You pay a little more but simply put your business in safe hands. Especially when you look for balance point between cost and service quality, you can't really find better choice.

Check out Arvixe business hosting plans at www.arvixe.com
Visit InMotionHosting at www.inmotionhosting.com