Part of running a small business usually involves hosting one, two, or in the case of a Domainer many websites. Initially you can usually start-out with a shared hosting plan but once your traffic grows you’ll probably need to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server. I’ve been in the process of updating my server options moving to a more beefy VPS and doing my best to learn some of the intricacies of security and scalability. While you can always hire someone to manage your servers sometimes I do like getting my hands dirty and learning these things myself, since servers are something that are so important to my business I like to know the geeky stuff.
So what do you do when you run a small business and you want to learn more about hosting? Just like in many spaces you can turn to a trusty forum and begin interacting with people that often have the same questions as you, and plenty of folks with tons of experience willing to share their knowledge for free. Over the last week I wouldn’t have been able to make nearly as much progress as I did without spending some time in the Web Hosting Talk forums.
I found that people on the forum were always more than willing to help and the information they shared saved me a ton of time. I was also surprised to find a pretty active community of Domain Name owners as there is a whole section of the forum dedicated to buying and selling domain names. I guess this isn’t much of a surprise since hosting and domain names are so closely related. The forums are very active so if you have a question you’ll usually only wait a few minutes before someone has followed-up with you.
It’s been a lot of fun configuring my VPS (yes I’m a huge geek) and this has inspired me to learn more about the hosting world. I will most likely be attending a major hosting conference in San Diego in August to continue to expand my knowledge. While I don’t plan to invest much time on a monthly basis to hosting, I would like to know that if all my sites go down I don’t have to feel completely powerless, I can take action, run diagnostics, troubleshoot, etc.
So if you’re a geek like me, or if you just want to know a little more about the hosting world I highly recommend WebHostingTalk.com. I’m not being paid to post this and there is no cost to join the forum so I don’t make a penny recommending them. As usual this is a resource that has helped me so I thought I’d share it with other small business owners. Enjoy!
