A2 Hosting made the first addition of AbleReach’s list of Green Hosts. In their list, they mention that:

“A2 Hosting buys carbon credits from Carbonfund.org to offset their server emissions. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

This of course is very true. You’ll also find a lot of other green activities performed by A2 Hosting and their employees. Not only does our company employ telecommuting practices to reduce carbon emissions from daily commutes, but when glancing at our office’s garbage cans, you won’t find wadded up paper towels or disposal cups. All employees are encouraged to bring water bottles for beverages, as A2 Hosting doesn’t buy disposable cups, and to use re-usable towels for any cleaning activities.

When I was in high school, I took a web editing class and the main software we used was Microsoft FrontPage. It was actually quite easy to use because it was pretty much like using word processing software to build a website. I always thought that a program like FrontPage equaled the playing field because one didn’t need to know HTML code or be a graphic designer to build a website. Since that class, I have always wanted to build just a basic website, but never wanted to purchase the somewhat expensive FrontPage software. I know basic HTML, but nowhere enough to build a web page. I came across a program called Trellian Webpage yesterday. What attracted it to me was that it was free and was a WYSIWYG web editor, meaning “what you see is what you get”.

I didn’t think that there was a chance that a free web editing program could possibly be worth my time. Plus companies always entice you with “free” only for it to be a 3 day trial or need to upgrade to a better version to be able to utilize any useful features. But I decided to download it nonetheless. I have to say, I was impressed. It reminded me entirely of FrontPage. It also has an easy web publisher so when you are done creating or editing your web page, you can easily upload it to via your A2 Hosting account. It is worth a try for those like me who are not so savvy when it comes to HTML editing.

I have been researching expert opinions regarding advantages and disadvantages of reseller hosting and have come up with the general consensus of their thoughts.

Advantages

*More Flexible – This is true. Instead of having a general cPanel account for all of your hosting accounts, you can use WHM to set up an individual cPanel for every website.

*Save Money – This depends on your situation. If you own one small site, a shared hosting account should do. If you plan on selling hosting to 100’s of clients, it is definitely cheaper to buy one affordable reseller plan as opposed to an individual shared account for each client.

*Possibility of high ROI – Absolutely. If you are able to grow your client list, you can purchase a reseller account for as little as $17.95/month. Let’s say you get 20 clients and charge each of them $5/month in hosting. You profit over $80/month, and this number can grow substantially based on the scale of your operation.

* Focus resources on customer support – When you don’t have to focus on server maintenance and other costs associated with being a large scale web host, it is a lot easier to pool your resources to make sure that your customers are happy.

Key Disadvantage

Your success as a reseller relies on your host – Sure it can, depending on your web host. But when you choose A2 Hosting who takes great pride in their 99.9% uptime guarantee, your worries should be severely mitigated.

In case there are some of you out there that prefer to spell out A2 Hosting longhand when surfing to our site, this link is for you: ATwoHosting.com.

I have been in the affiliate marketing industry for just over 3 years now and I have seen my fair share of scams. The one that has bothered me the most was a company that would sell mirrored affiliate sites at extreme prices. This company purchased a domain (let’s just say as an example) abcd.com. The company would then find an affiliate marketing company that sounded very profitable ($200/sale) and make a template website for that company. Next, they would contact unwilling potential customers and tell them that they could sell them a site that needed no maintenance and could earn them $200/sale. Sounds  great, right?

It wasn’t great at all. This company would charge a ridiculous set up fee as well as a per month hosting fee of $19/month for this mirrored site. So essentially if you were their 2,000^th customer, they would be given you the same site as their first 1,999 customers, only your link would be abcd.com/2000. They would then sign you up for that lucrative program and just change the affiliate links on the template site to yours.

There are two big issues I have with this. One, you’re not going to sell anything with a template, mirrored site. Google penalizes for duplicate content and there was no way to edit the page to make your page unique. Second and most concerning, it is obviously a scam because of the huge investment needed that would never make any return.

Come to A2 Hosting for your affiliate site. We’ll hook you up with hosting for as low as $3.45/month without a setup fee. And yes, you’ll actually have control over your site.

Make sure to check out A2 Hosting’s press release regarding their release of Zend Framework Hosting. You can view the press release here http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=66100. You won’t want to miss what a Zend Technologies spokesperson said about this announcement.

In this month’s A2 Host Post, we brought up a domain name registration scam that we wanted our customers to be aware of. Even if you are not an A2 Hosting, I still think it is pertinent to send this information along. Like most people, I absolutely hate seeing consumers being scammed.

Hosting not only hosts websites but we also register domains (or you can transfer it to us). We want to preface this information with the fact that we respect your decision to use any registrar that you choose, but please be aware of the following scam. There are a few companies that send out very convincing looking ‘domain renewal forms’ in hopes to get you to switch to them as a registrar often for an outrageous cost of $40 or more per year. Comparatively, A2 Hosting charges $12.95/year for domain registration. These letters indicate that your domain will be expiring soon and they provide an invoice for domain renewal. These companies are real registrars, but the issue is how they make their sales. The letters are an attempt to have you switch your domain registration to them for these exorbitant fees. Please do not provide them with any credit card information or respond to these emails. Once again, A2 Hosting absolutely respects your decision to use any registrar, but we want to protect our customers from thinking these renewal notices are in any way related to your domain registration at A2 Hosting.

Please not that if your domain(s) are registered via A2 Hosting, you will receive an invoice 1-2 months prior to the domain renewal date. The domain name will be renewed automatically if you are an automatic billing customer. Otherwise, the domain is renewed when we receive your domain renewal payment.

There has been a running joke that former Vice President Al Gore created the internet and therefore owns it. Joking aside, who actually does own the internet? My main question regarding internet ownership has always been who owns unregistered domains? For example, A2 Hosting does domain registration, but we don’t own every unregistered domain, so where does that domain registration money go? And how did the company get control over all of the unregistered domains? This is a confusing quandary, don’t you think?

After some research, it turns out that nobody is profiting from domain registration. There is actually a non-profit organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) that is in charge of managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. According to their site “To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn’t have one global Internet.”

So how did ICANN get all of this power? The company Network Solutions once operated the .com, .net, and .org registries, and was the authority of domain registration until many other registrars stepped into the market. Why should one company get all the control? We live in a Capitalistic society, correct? In October 1998, Net Solution’s agreement with the US Department of Commerce was changed because of the need for a Shared Registration System. A company must be approved by the Shared Registration System to become a designated registrar. To register a domain, one must go through a registrar approved by the Shared Registration System.

A2 Hosting is a firm supporter of Linux Hosting technology. We have been using it as our primary server operating system since our inception as Iniquinet in May of 2000. We offer affordable shared, reseller, VPS and dedicated Linux hosting packages that include favorite and most popular open source add-ons like cPanel, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, SSH access and more. A major part of A2 Hosting’s foundation is to maintain our incredible technical support and releasing the most current hosting technologies while also preserving our unbelievably low prices.

Are you ready to give A2 Hosting a try? Use the coupon code forums15off at the checkout to take advantage of a 15% off discount. This coupon code expires June 30, 2008.

I’ve really enjoyed my time at A2 Hosting, but I think my next venture has come along thanks to a wonderful man named Frank Chambers. Mr. Chambers sent me an email today informing me that I am a benefactor of $7.5 million.

“The funds total US$7.5 Million and you were made the beneficiary of these funds by a benefactor whose details will be revealed to you after handing over the funds to you in accordance with the Agreement I signed with the benefactor when he enlisted my assistance in delivering the funds to you.”

Not only am I excited to get my hands on this $7.5 million, but it is just killing me to see who I am inheriting this money from. I still can’t believe my good fortune. I just don’t know why Frank didn’t just call me.