In follow up on the Get Things Gnome post, things got done! The little program application has gotten good use while setting up the humble beginnings of a web hosting service. I’m very proud of the newly found organized way and it’s results. Performing the little tasks to get the bigger ones done or Kai Zen is definitely the way to go if you work on a bigger project on your own. The quantity of posting, I set forth before, is still not up to par with these goals but I intend to make up for that by posting quality usable content.

On that note, I continue with some more news about my business adventures. This certainly is a multidisciplinary undertaking. One has to have some skill in all aspects of related technology uses and marketing on the web. But to start out, one get’s a domain name, a data center or provider for the servers you will using. You can at first get a reseller plan at another web hosting provider for cheap with reasonable plans. To get my feet wet and check out the waters I went with the lowest plan on offer for 25 dollars a month. I would have liked to get a dedicated server in a data-center but that is financially more exhausting with a cost of hundreds of dollars monthly. The dedicated machines is the future plan and desirable thing to work towards, possibly with my own servers in a nearby data-center. In the meantime a shared service is used, I’m not worried of sustaining hundreds of sites on this 36 cpu machine with plenty of memory.

Then after this the real work starts, designing the website front end, it’s easier to use a free template and use that design to mold it to your liking. A good sense of HTML and CSS comes in handy though, a good template layout will save you lots of time. It’s important to have a good looking but simple layout according to one of my knowledgeable friends on identi.ca. Following his advice I redesigned my primary effort to the current more polished less confusing state. For manipulating graphics the open source GIMP program was used. Bluefish is also an excellent HTML editor with extra pep in it’s step by being able to handle many more than just editing HTML. I highly recommend this application. Be prepared to go back and alter the design as you make your host plans or get a better idea of what you want to convey to your potential customers

Following the design of your front-end, you want to setup your host machine with a back-end program to handle billing and automation. My plan came with a WHMCS license, so I downloaded that from the companies client site. Although free you have to sign up to get it with the free full license. Setup was fairly standard by dropping the unzipped directories in www folder of the root directory. You also need to setup a database account, which is used by the billing program to keep track of customers and transactions. Now if you have been living under a rock SSL probably won’t mean much to you, well it’s important to have your customers feel secure doing a financial transaction with you. So you need to get and install a SSL certificate on your server for your business domain name. The billing software seems to be working alright, only one thing that I find really sucks is how hard it is to integrate the order form with the overall style of your site, and the default portal look it supplies. To be honest, it needs work, and a little bit more knowledge of PHP coding will certainly help out with that.

So far my summary of what has transpired over the month, I like to thank my buddy Bart for, unknown to himself, inspiring me to go for it. Be all you can be and peace out.