Carl Burnham's new book, "Web Hosting" serves as an excellent resource for entrepreneurs to gain competitive knowledge concerning the Web hosting marketplace. Rawlson King, managing editor and analyst at the Web Host Industry Review reviews the work.
By: Rawlson King, theWHIR.com
"Web Hosting," a new 448-page book published by McGraw/Hill, attempts to offer a complete strategy for delivering high-quality Web hosting services. The work is designed for budding entrepreneurs, intent to offer their own innovative, secure and cost-effective hosting solutions. Web designers, programmers, and IT consultants interested in reselling will benefit greatly from the comprehensive coverage of topics and solutions that are highlighted in this book.
The book attempts to take a comprehensive view of how to start, market and build a Web host. Authored by Carl Burnham, a Web developer and hosting consultant, the book draws upon over 15 years of his IT industry experience, which span marketing, support, and network management. He has specialized in analyzing Internet-related trends and technologies since 1995, and is a former Senior Network Administrator with webMD.
For existing Web hosts, Burnham presents affordable solutions that are designed to significantly improve customer service, with tips on enhancing security, and infrastructure. The book focuses on key value-added services, including: performance monitoring, content distribution, security, load balancing and managed hosting of applications and servers.
Despite the fact that the book examines such complex issues, it is still approachable to the hosting novice. The work is a detailed and unique resource that delivers a full-range of strategies for providing successful solutions that will meet the needs of customers both large and small. From technical support to customer service to Web marketing strategies, the book attempts to cover the wide range of issues pertinent to any start-up hosting provider. The resource is useful because it provides an excellent overview of the hosting marketplace, the multiple segments of the industry, and the technology required to ensure quality service.
Using the work, a new entrepreneur can learn the differences between the multitudes of hosting plans offered and learn how to select a hosting platform and Web server for their clientele.
The book also examines marketing strategies in-depth, and tackles such areas as Web presentation and design, media advertising, press releases, industry affiliations and online marketing approaches to promote a hosting business, which include targeted mailings, banner advertisements and online contests.
>From this point, the book moves onto examining how to provision descent technical support to keep customers loyal. The work looks at the wide range of options from basic customer support to full-blown customer relationship management. The book also examines service level agreements (SLAs) and SLA management.
One of the most important sections also examines how to gauge customer satisfaction. This is one of the most significant and fascinating areas of the book, since it helps start-up companies identify the ways and means to suppress customer churn. The book suggests the use of "win-win" surveys and interactive customer service.
"Web Hosting" also covers an impressive roster of technical issues, including securing network infrastructure such as development of firewall architectures, developing a security policy, latency management, routing, and choosing reliable backbone providers.
The technical side of the book also examines the causes of downtime, and provides a high-level examination of network monitoring tools. A small proportion of the book is further devoted to enhancing network performance and expansion into data center facilities. This section of the book examines Linux and Windows clustering solutions, caching solutions, and other methods of enhancing hosting solution availability such as RAID.
"Web Hosting" also dedicates a small portion towards examining emerging market segments such as managed services and services.
While the book serves as an excellent resource to gain competitive knowledge concerning the Web hosting marketplace, readers will get the sense that the book has attempted to cover to many issues.
Regardless, the work is an outstanding beginning for anyone wishing to start his or her own SME hosting firm or reseller business. Even business professionals seeking to gain an edge on the types of Web hosts and how to decide among services available will benefit from strategies revealed in the book.
"Web Hosting" retails for $39.99 U.S. and is an excellent purchase for resellers and small business Internet consultants.
