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PC Pro Business How to be a virtual ISP

PC PRO January 2008 www.pcpro.co.uk156

Whether you’re a design company or an IT support company, you might want

to offer your clients a one-stop shop for their internet needs. That could mean domain registration, web and email hosting, perhaps even going so far as to offer ADSL broadband connectivity.

After all, many clients prefer to deal with one company. And there are plenty of benefits for you, too: undertaking ISP services for your client also means they become a regular revenue stream for your company, and you’re able to stay in touch with them between larger jobs.

On the other hand, maybe you want a job that will enable you to work from almost anywhere in the world. The idea of sitting on a beach somewhere, sipping margaritas and still earning money is appealing. So how could you achieve this? Simple: become a virtual ISP.

Many of the larger ISPs allow you to become a virtual ISP on top of their infrastructure, enabling you to provide a variety of services to your clients and also give them a single point of contact for all their online needs.

There is a variety of services that help you achieve this, from simple web hosting to full, dedicated servers and beyond. The aim of this feature is to highlight what you need to look for when choosing an ISP, and to review the services offered by various UK ISPs.

How it worksYou might want just to host your clients’ websites and perhaps forward the email for their domain to a single email account. Or you might want to become a virtual ISP, selling everything from broadband through to email hosting, perhaps offering multiple operating systems. While the temptation to offer a fully comprehensive package is great, think hard about the amount of time you can afford to allocate to support issues.

Generally, websites will just sit there and give very little trouble; however, ADSL support can be a nightmare. Any client will know immediately if their ADSL line has gone down and with the poor to non-existent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on offer it can be some time before the line is working again. In the meantime, you have the customer on your back asking when it will be fixed. Selling ADSL is very much a numbers game and it’s difficult to make real money from it; support costs can eat into your profits and time, so think carefully about these issues before you offer a particular service.

As for technical expertise, probably the most difficult part of setting things up for a client is getting the DNS records correct and, as this has to be done first for even the simplest hosting, it’s something you need to fully understand. Having said that, all the companies here

will help you out, and their control panels, to varying degrees, make DNS understandable. What we found disappointing is how many made it difficult to find URLs for the web server, mail server and FTP server – often, these were hidden away with the DNS settings.

With any form of hosting, it’s always a good idea to have some form of external monitoring of your servers. Don’t just rely on your ISP’s monitoring solutions, as these will often be working within their own network and won’t always show up external connectivity issues. These issues may not be the fault of your ISP, but you can be sure your customers won’t see it that way. If they or their customers can’t see their website, it’s your problem to fix!

Once you’ve carried out some basic diagnostics to determine where the problem lies, you may need to contact your ISP’s support desk. Often these

Mark NewtoN ProvIdeS a guIde to SettIng uP your comPany aS an ISP, uSIng tHe lateSt generatIon of wHIte-label HoStIng PackageS

How to be a Virtual ISP

mark newtonmD of the internet company eCats Ltd (electronic CatalogueS), specialising in internet-based solutions and often working with design houses. works from a Victorian railway station in deepest Suffolk. email [email protected]

www.pcpro.co.uk January 2008 PC PRO 157

Caption here please caption here please

Becoming an ISP needn’t involve hardware administration.

problems seem to occur out of hours; they probably don’t in reality – you just remember those calls from an angry customer at midnight. As a result, many of the ISPs have different solutions for out-of-office support; check these carefully to make sure you’re happy with their offerings.

Also, remember to make sure when you sign up your customers that you don’t offer them a better SLA than the one provided to you by your ISP. For example, many ISP’s offer 99.5% uptime and will refund part of the charges if downtime exceeds that.

Finally, read the fair-use policy. For example, the Fasthosts policy states that, “Any file not part of the website is considered unacceptable use”, so you can’t use the server to store files for others to download that aren’t linked to the site. Not a big issue, but it shows the importance of reading the terms and conditions so as to avoid your website being “pulled”.

Types of hostingSo what are the main types of hosting solutions offered by these ISPs? First, there’s shared hosting. This is the cheapest type, where your websites share the same web server as others. The danger here is that someone else’s website may cause the web server to slow down or stop.

A better solution is to have your own server. There are two options: virtual and dedicated. The cheaper option is to have a virtual server that still looks like a real server to you, but runs on the same hardware as several other virtual servers.

The environment used to virtualise is important: systems such as Xen and VMware allow resources to be dedicated to each virtual machine, whereas Virtuozzo currently doesn’t. Without the ability to dedicate resources to a virtual machine, there’s a danger of a rogue process on one virtual server consuming all the memory or CPU cycles and so bringing down the lot.

The sure-fire cure for this is to opt for the dedicated hosting option, where you get your own hardware server, but this is more expensive, to say nothing of the environmental cost. In many ways, virtual hosting – where up to 50 virtual servers can co-exist on one physical box – gives you the best of both worlds, while helping to reduce the power taken by machine rooms.

When deciding on the package, also consider the support offerings. Some ISPs offer a fully managed service where they’ll monitor your server for you and look after it, although this costs a lot more than the self-managed service contract. The package you choose really depends on the size of your operation, your client needs and your budget.

If you’re going to offer e-commerce then some sort of secure certificate is a must. You can either register your own, or many ISPs offer a shared SSL certificate, which is a cheaper option.



Easyspace Fasthosts Memset Namesco Servelogic WebFusion

Overall rating ★★★★★★ ★★★★★★ ★★★★★★ ★★★★★★ ★★★★★★ ★★★★★★

OS supported Windows, Linux Windows, Linux Windows, Linux Windows, Linux Windows only Windows, Linux

Technologies supported Perl, CGI, PHP, MySQL, MSSQL, ASP.NET 1.1, ASP.NET 2, SSI, FrontPage, SharePoint

ASP, PHP, Perl, CGI, Python, ASP.NET2, MySQL, MSSQL

PHP, CGI, Perl, MySQL, FrontPage, ASP

Perl, PHP, FrontPage, MySQL, ASP, ASP.NET2, MSSQL2005, SharePoint

SharePoint, Live Communication, BlackBerry, ASP, ASP.NET

ASP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL

Phone support UK-based, office hours. 24/7 ticket system

UK-based 24/7 UK-based, office hours. Out of hours from £15/month

Free UK-based. Mon-Fri 8am- 6pm, Sat/Sun 10am-6pm

UK-based, out of hours included in packages

UK-based 24/7

Backup Internal backup system included in price

£290 for 25GB Yes, full overnight backup Internal; £35 charge to restore Mailsafe None

Shared SSL £49 (pro reseller only) £45 per 10Mb Dedicated only at £96/year Included in some packages Dedicated only at £152/year £30

Stats Inc in price £10 Inc in price Inc in price N/A Inc in price

Shared hosting, low spec From £25 From £48 N/A From £60 From £72 From £36

Shared hosting, high spec From £180 From £192 N/A From £228 From £144 From £120

Virtual server, low spec From £239 N/A From £240 From £600 Coming soon From £180

Virtual server, high spec From £419 N/A From £720 From £750 Coming soon From £480

Dedicated server, low spec £720 £588 £1,560 £1,320 £888 £960

Dedicated server, high spec £1,800 £2,388 £3,600 £6,000 £1,776 £4,800

E-commerce Actinic £100 setup, £20/month, 3.5% per transaction

OSCommerce In-house web shops from £780 £2,916 Via 123-reg.co.uk from £9/month

Bandwidth 10Gb to 50Gb/month, £1 per gigabyte per month if over

Unlimited 5Mb/sec-10Mb/sec; unmetered but pooled

20Gb/month for business services, £2 per gigabyte per month if over

Unlimited 15Gb/month on basic, unlimited on reseller and server packages

SEO £20-£115 £24-£120 Not provided £20-£115 Not provided £23-£114

One of the critical factors when choosing any ISP is connectivity

and its reliability. To test this, we use three methods. One is the excellent Bello network-monitoring system (www.bello-monitors-the.net/home) by Paessler. This monitors the servers from Texas in the US. We then use VisualRoute Advanced (www.visualroute.com) to constantly trace the route the network packets take from a server at Redbus in London and also from a server in the US.

We leave these tests to run for four weeks. This provides us with connectivity data and trace route info showing the route network packets were taking to get to the servers. We also run a stress test against the companies’ web servers using the Paessler Webserver Stress Tool Enterprise Edition (www.paessler.com/webstress), which simulates hundreds of users clicking randomly on web pages.

How we testPlus, how we work out the ratings

ratingS expLaineDThe overall star rating for each ISP is based on a combination of features and performance.

Here, we just give a brief account of the results for the sake of comparison. However, the reports produced are formidable, and it’s one of the best tools for stress-testing web servers.

We also try out each of the ISPs’ support options with various questions – and we’re pleased to report that we found no issues. Obviously, there will be times when the support you’re offered is less than optimal, but all the companies featured seem to take customersupport seriously and sink a lot of resources into their offerings.

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Fasthosts

Memset

Namesco

Easyspace

WebFusion

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0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

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9

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57Fasthosts

Namesco

Servelogic

Memset

WebFusion

Easyspace

3

All prices exc VAT and are correct at time of going to press.

COmParISOn TaBLE

A rough guide to the prices and bundles offered by ISPs on test.

One of the reasons we recommend WebFusion is its superb performance in our real-world tests, which took place over a month.



some figures to what it classifies as fair use. For example, starter packages should use no more than 50-100GB of bandwidth per month, while the Pro packages allow 150-300GB. Easyspace equates this to approximately 18 million hits a month, but sites that concentrate on graphics and video will obviously consume bandwidth faster. Should your site exceed the limit, Easyspace will charge you £1 per gigabyte per month.

Although Easyspace offers a wide range of products, we’d have liked to see more options when selecting virtual or dedicated servers. For example, the RAM is a little low at 128MB and 256MB on the virtual servers and the virtualisation system is Virtuozzo – so it isn’t as flexible as Memset’s offering. Also note that the dedicated servers offer only two hard disks, so RAID5 or RAID10 (the recommended configuration for MSSQL) would be impossible to achieve. And, in our tests, it was the slowest in terms of request times, although its downtime was excellent – zero minutes.

Easyspace is easy to use and we found its connectivity and customer service levels to be strong. If the limitations we’ve highlighted won’t be a problem for you, it’s a sound choice.

dedicated hosting being less than half that of the others listed here (it also offers hosting for registered charities for £12.50 per year). As usual, the “unlimited bandwidth” on its server packages is determined by a fair-use policy tucked away in the terms and conditions. Less usually, Easyspace puts

Easyspace’s big claim to fame is ease of use. This isn’t immediately obvious when you start using its control panel software, which, for most of its services, is custom written. It takes some getting used to, but does have the benefit that it just shows you the options you need to worry about for that task. Its dedicated server options come with the excellent third-party Plesk control panel, as used by several other ISPs.

Easyspace offers many products, including blogging and services (such as EasyWebSubmit, an SEO tool, and EasyMailer for email marketing) to help promote your websites.

Support is also high on the agenda. The website now offers a customer support forum, which is always a brave thing for any ISP to provide. During our test, Easyspace’s support response was very good, with tickets being resolved within the hour.

Prices are particularly keen, with

internetwww.easyspace .com

As for e-commerce, Fasthosts offers a credit card-brokering system, so your company doesn’t have to apply for a Merchant number. This makes online processing much easier, producing less paperwork. There’s a monthly £20 charge, £100 setup fee, plus a 3.5% charge per

Fasthosts offers a range of services to suit almost everyone. The pricing structure is different to many other ISPs: instead of bundling features together in a larger package, it charges separately for items. This means you pay for what you want, but you or your client could end up paying more than you initially budgeted for.

Its control panel is easy to follow. For example, it gives the URLs of the web, FTP and email servers as you set them up. Another advantage is that it supports Microsoft streaming media mount points, so media can stream from multiple locations.

The SiteBuilder tool offers a simple way to build a website – a bonus if you want to offer web hosting to smaller customers. Fasthosts will also enable you to sell ADSL broadband or dial-up to your customers, thus making you a one-stop shop for your clients’ online needs.

transaction, but you can be up and running within 48 hours.

Fasthosts offers a completely UK-based 24/7 support service, with engineers available on its reseller packages, and also offers a customised RSS feed on the status of “your” network. If your web server is affecting server performance, which is usually because of poor scripting on the website, then it may be moved to a development server for two weeks to allow the problems to be dealt with – but your site will remain live during this time.

Bandwidth is governed by the usual fair-use policy. Fasthosts also boasts of its “virtual data pipe”, which means that, within reason, bandwidth considerations can be forgotten. This, and the ability to create a secure private network, means that if you have multiple servers that need to communicate between each other they can do so at 100Mb/sec.

What hinders Fasthosts is its real-world performance in our tests: 57 minutes of downtime is more than we’d hope for. However, if you want a wide range of products and a flexible pricing structure, Fasthosts remains a good choice.

performanCe★★★★★★featureS★★★★★★VaLue for money★★★★★★ovErall★★★★★★

internetwww.fasthosts .co.uk


easyspace Businesses that place convenience above hard-core features should certainly consider this affordable option

fasthostsa flexible package that allows you to offer a complete solution for your clients, with some nice extra touches too

Fasthosts takes an à la carte approach to packages.

Ease of use and customer service are Easyspace’s strong suits.



Memset uses Centos for its virtual and dedicated server offerings. This is a competent control panel, although it would be nice to see some wizards to help with the initial setup.

When it comes to providing servers, Memset’s product range is powerful. The top-of-the-range server is a twin quad-core Xeon with 4TB of RAID5 storage and 16GB of RAM. Full clustering is also offered. Even its virtual server offerings are customisable via the web, although there’s a limit of 192MB of RAM and only RAID1 available (which is fine for web hosting).

Memset is unique in using Xen and VMware, which allows for a greater range of customisable options as well as “burst RAM” for times when your virtual server is busy. The company also offers several firewall and monitoring solutions.

Memset’s offerings make it easy to recommend the company if you just require hosting, but it doesn’t currently offer a lot of search engine optimisation or ADSL sales, or even help with domain registrations. What it does, though, it does well – and for straight hosting it’s at the top of our list.

Normal office-hours support is via a freephone number and email.

Memset allows its customers to stipulate the exact specification of virtual or dedicated servers from scratch, as well as the bandwidth and support package required. For the control panel,

Rather than being a subsidiary of a telecoms organisation, Memset is a privately owned company. One sign of this is its generous nature – it offers free hosting to any registered charity in return for a “hosted by” link on their website.

It also takes an unusual approach to support. Rather than offer an all-in bundle, Memset has three bands: Basic, Premium and Fully Managed. Anything outside the level of support offered is available at a charge.

Its out-of-hours rate can be as high as £149 an hour, but Memset also offers an SMS-only system: the customer uses the web support panel to raise a support ticket, which then texts an engineer. Memset reckons on a response within 15 minutes. It’s a decent solution, but if you’re in a remote area and a client rings to say its web server is down you might be a bit stuck.

internetwww.memset .com


internetwww.names. co.uk


memset the offerings are a little limited, but if plain web hosting is what you need then Memset is a superb choice

Privately owned Memset offers free web hosting to registered charities.

and it’s impressively open about its response times, publishing them at www.names.co.uk/call-statistics.html. Coupled with the network status pages at www.names.co.uk/network_status.html, it all helps to keep you informed of any issues that might arise.

The company offers free telephone support from 8am to 8pm, Monday through Friday, and 10am to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday. There’s no extra out-of-hours support, although of course it monitors server status 24/7. We also found the staff helpful during our tests.

Namesco’s extensive range of products means you’d be able to offer your clients almost any online service they need. Its control panel is also one of the easiest to use. Where it falls down – and why it doesn’t get an award this month – is the lack of direct out-of-hours support. After all, that may well be the time you decide to update a client’s server, and if something goes wrong with the upgrade you’re on your own until the following morning.

That said, becoming a virtual ISP is easy with Namesco offerings, and the number of offerings it provides make it well worth a look.

will warn you as you use more than half your allowance that month, and you can either pay the extra 2p per megabyte or upgrade to a larger bandwidth package at the end of the month.

Namesco, like many others, places a lot of importance on customer support,

Namesco’s website screams “web hosting from £1”. It isn’t the most professional of starts, which could make convincing clients you should handle their web hosting difficult. However, if Namesco can offer such great deals, what can it offer you as a virtual ISP?

Quite a lot, it seems. Its control panel is simple to use, being both clear and easy to understand. It also offers pricing packages aimed squarely at the web designer; these packages offer full backup capabilities to protect your clients’ websites in the event of something bad happening.

However, be aware that Namesco limits the bandwidth to your websites and, although this won’t result in a client’s site going down if it suddenly becomes popular – as often happens if an article is picked up by a news aggregation site, such as Digg – it may bring extra charges. That said, Namesco

namesco extremely easy to set up as a virtual ISP, but it has a couple of limitations of which you should be aware

Namesco’s control panel is particularly easy to use.

www.pcpro.co.uk January 2008 PC PRO 163

cope at all times. Although we didn’t notice any difference in tests, it should help alleviate the “Digg effect”, when a server gets sudden, massive demand.

No backup system is provided, so the customer needs to provide their own, perhaps by simply downloading via FTP.

Part of the Pipex group, which has datacentres in London, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham, WebFusion offers a huge range of services. If you opt for its reseller package, you get a custom control panel; otherwise, you get the excellent third-party Plex package. Fortunately, the custom control panel is superb, showing any extra charges you might incur as you select services.

WebFusion allows the storage of MP3 and RealPlayer files on its servers. As always, though, ensure you understand the terms and conditions – they may have restrictions that will stop you implementing your clients’ solutions. Having a website “pulled” would be particularly embarrassing.

WebFusion has recently invested in a range of virtual server technologies, which have dynamically adjustable RAM to help deal with sudden increases in traffic, so your website should be able to

But we’d have liked to see an easy way of backing up all the configuration settings and the databases of one or multiple websites. It’s much quicker to back up within an ISP’s internal network rather than trying to download all the data via ADSL to your local machine.

WebFusion offers 24/7 UK-based support, with a ticketing system, whereby you can log and track the status of any issues. Keeping the customer informed of what’s happening is vital, and many small ISPs can often fall short on this issue because of a lack of resources. If you have a customer wanting to know why their website isn’t working, it’s vital to have all the facts to hand.

With everything from hosting to dial-up accounts on offer, plus the inclusion of virtual server hosting later this year, WebFusion will soon provide a complete list of services for the virtual ISP. Being part of the Pipex network also means it has the infrastructure to ensure that connectivity isn’t an issue, as is shown by our test results, with the minimum number of dropped pings of any of the ISPs on test. WebFusion could be a great partner in your new venture as a virtual ISP.

internet www.servelogic .com


internet www.webfusion .co.uk


webfusion Superb performance in our tests and good value for money make webFusion a great choice

WebFusion’s performance and value for money make it an excellent choice.

status, which, alongside its SaaS (Software as a Service) hosting platform with its API, sets it apart from many of its competitors.

Servelogic is particularly proud of its customer satisfaction audits. Out-of-hours support is offered as part of the packages, so there’s no extra cost to the

Servelogic is the odd man out in this test: web hosting is just a small part of what it offers. The company, until recently known as Hostlogic, specialises in Microsoft platforms and currently offers Microsoft Exchange with BlackBerry services, SharePoint and Microsoft Live Communications server hosting, plus standard Windows 2003 shared and dedicated hosting. Its datacentres are UK-based, as are its support staff, and it prides itself on a load-balanced, clustered fibre-based network. It doesn’t offer any e-commerce solutions, though.

For backing up your data, the company offers the MailSafe solution, which gives a five-year archiving service for your client email data store. Its bandwidth is unlimited, with no fair-use policy. Servelogic has achieved Microsoft Gold Certified

customer, certainly something rare among the larger ISPs.

Its control panel is powered by the third-party program Unity, which has a clean look. It can initially seem confusing, until you get used to the

terminology, but once you’ve familiarised yourself, setting up of most things becomes simple – the support staff were very helpful too.

Servelogic’s approach is refreshingly open, with an extensive network status web page that lists the issues it’s having – a customer may not understand the problems involved in running a network, but would rather be kept informed of problems as they happen.

If you want an ISP that will offer you the capability of being a one-stop shop virtual ISP then Servelogic isn’t the best choice. However, it becomes an excellent

option if you’re a Microsoft-based house and want to offer your clients Microsoft-based solutions. What’s more, the ability to offer SharePoint hosting puts the company firmly in the corporate camp, as does its capability to offer BlackBerry email hosting.

Servelogicwith plenty of corporate-level features on offer, Servelogic provides a good alternative to regular offerings

Out-of-hours support is included in all Servelogic’s packages.

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