HostingZoom Blog

We here at HostingZoom appreciate how daunting a task it can be to choose the right host. After all, there are so many hosts out there, all of whom promise to give you the best deal.

So how does one choose the best host? Here are some points to consider, and how we fit into the picture.

Customer Service: The last thing you want is to watch your website go offline, and have no one available to help you. At HostingZoom, that won’t happen. We offer several methods of support: trouble ticket, chat, telephone, and we even offer a Support Manager who can address issues if you feel that you’re not getting the attention you deserve.

Reliability: Obviously, you need your host to be reliable. You want your website up 24/7, right? We offer clustered failover hosting, which means that if one server goes offline, your website can stay up. With most hosts, if the server that your website is hosted on goes offline, your website goes with it. That’s not the case with HostingZoom, which means more uptime for your website or blog.

Trust: We understand that some customers may be hesitant to trust a company that they don’t physically visit. We’re located in Houston, Texas, and are accredited by the Better Business Bureau. We are not a “fly by night” company; our parent company, Landis Holdings, Inc., has been around for 11 years. Unfortunately, there are quite a few “hosting companies” run by teenagers out of their bedrooms. While their desire to run a business at such a young age is admirable, your website needs to be in the hands of a company with experience, and resources.

Ease of use: What good is a hosting company if you can’t use their services easily? At HostingZoom, we make the entire process easy for you. In fact, we’ll even help you move from your old host, as long as you use Cpanel as your control panel environment. Not many hosts offer that service!

Here at HostingZoom, we care about all of our customers, and when you sign up for service with us, you’re more than just a number. We think that when you apply the factors mentioned above to any host you may be considering, you’ll see that HostingZoom is the smart move!

Here at HostingZoom, we make things easy if you want to move into the reseller arena. That’s why we created the ResellerZoom subdivision.

Through ResellerZoom, you can obtain a reseller account for as little as $6.95 a month. No matter what package you choose, you get our legendary customer service, and you also get an added bonus: the ClientExec billing software. This allows you to easily invoice your clients, and collect payments. With this software, clients simply log into their accounts, and pay their bills. No more will you have to worry about keeping track of clients’ due dates; the software does it for you, and it comes with your service!

But what about support? We’ve got that covered, too. We can provide transparent support, which means that we’ll offer technical support to your clients, and we’ll do so under your service’s name. This is perfect for smaller hosting companies who may not be able to offer 24-hour support, but still want to make sure their clients are taken care of at 1 am just as well as 1 pm.

Our reselling services are “private label”, which means that we remain completely transparent; it’s almost as if you’re running your own datacenter!

With all of these services available, there should be no doubt that HostingZoom and ResellerZoom can meet and exceed your expectations. Not only will we take care of you as our client, we’ll help you by taking care of your clients as well!

Give it a try. You’ve nothing to lose, because we’re so confident in the quality of our services that we’ll offer a 30-day money back guarantee, and to top it all off, we charge no setup fee.

We won’t be like the annoying guy on an infomercial for a local home improvement business and ask “what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?”, but…well…what are you waiting for? Give it a shot!

Some of those other guys don’t like supporting their customers. They like taking your money, but when it comes to customer service, they’re simply not there for the handoff.

Well, at HostingZoom, that’s not a problem, because we firmly believe in supporting our clients. That’s why we offer several different methods of support.

You can submit a traditional trouble ticket, or you can chat with a support technician. You can also get support over the telephone, or on our customer forums. Whatever method is best for you, we’ll give you the top-notch, quality support that you deserve as our client.

Why is support important? If your website is down, or if you’re having problems with the service, then you’re probably not happy. We don’t like our clients to be unhappy, and just as importantly, we like to know about problems, so we can fix them right away. More than likely, if there’s some sort of network issue, we’re already aware of it, and already working on it, but we never mind hearing from our clients, and we appreciate people letting us know about issues, so that we can respond to them promptly.

At HostingZoom, you never have to worry about being left in the dark, because we offer several methods of support. Some guys only offer e-mail support, and still others offer none at all. That’s simply not how we do business here.

One of the things that comes with our hosting packages is the Cpanel software.

What is it? It’s a control panel software, which makes server administration literally a matter of clicking a button or two. With Cpanel, you can quickly administer your website in all aspects, from setting up e-mail addresses to managing your files if you don’t have an FTP program handy.

The control panel environment is completely icon-based, which means that you log in to the program by way of yoursite.com/cpanel, and then click the icon that represents the option you want. The software is extremely easy to use, and is industry standard.

Need to check your website’s stats? You can do that. Need to ban a user’s IP address? Yup. You can even set up hotlink protection, which will prevent users from directly linking to graphical files on your site, thereby depleting your bandwidth. With Cpanel, you’ll have complete and total control over your website.

Whether you’re a beginner or expert user, Cpanel is the perfect solution for your website, because it makes administration easy, eliminating the need to log in via SSH and administer your SQL databases via the command line.

When you’re using Cpanel, you can concentrate more on developing your website, and less on actually administering it.

If you’ve looked at our homepage, you’ve probably seen a service that touts “clustered failover technology”.  What’s the big deal?

Our ;Clustered Failover Web Hosting offers an advantage over many of those other guys: your website won’t go down due to a sudden burst of traffic. 

Basically, your website can still be on a shared account, but it will be hosted on clustered servers.  This will allow for traffic to be routed to the next available server, which results in maximum uptime for your site.  All your data is copied across the cluster instantly, and that includes blogs and message boards. Here’s an example: when you update your blog, and moments later you get hit with a high amount of visitors, your website will be sitting pretty and serving up, because your update will have been instantly copied across the cluster network, meaning that no matter what server your visitor is routed to, they will see your updated blog.

The problem with most hosting plans is this: your site is typically hosted on one server.  If another website on that server gets a sudden burst of traffic, your site may go down with it.  Or, if that server experiences a technical malfunction of some sort, your website will likewise go down. But that won’t happen with us.  And just so you know, this technology is not just limited to our shared hosting packages.  As your needs grow, HostingZoom can meet them all.

So if you’re on a budget, but still require maximum uptime, then HostingZoom is the place for you.  Regardless of what service you purchase, when you combine our reliable service with our caring staff, you’re the winner!

Time to kick it high gear!  Every now and then we go and completely shake up the hosting industry, this year is no exception.

I won’t lie, it hasn’t been all cake and ice cream the last several months but the benefits are awesome. When we acquired Hostingzoom we did so with knowledge that while it had a great client base, pretty solid servers, and a good reputation, it was also hitting a stage f growing pains. It was easy to identify though having been there ourselves many years ago. We made mistakes back then, and learned a great deal. We knew what we could do with Hostingzoom/Resellerzoom so we weren’t the least bit worried, just excited and perhaps a little frustrated that we couldn’t do things faster. Our entire goal in a nutshell was to drastically improve the quality of service while squashing the few problems the company faced.

We come to the public, and our loyal base, today to finally announce the hard work we’ve done, and the road ahead of us. Without further delay here are some of the things we would like to shout about.

Since August we’ve had a dedicated team of in house developers, admins, techs, and managers working on software improvements yo our own inhouse system we have used for years in other companies we run. This new system, an all-in-one client dashboard is in beta testing and while not ready just, it is within a month or so of being ready to go live. So what can this system do? A truthfully more accurate question is what can’t it  do. Here’s a small fraction of features :

- Billing system, manage/pay/download your invoices, paypal subscription, order new services or accounts, rewards system, affiliate system, server monitoring, network monitoring, ip management, user management (set you own users and permissions , for example you  want a tech to be able to contact us for support but not be able to access any billing), support center, knowledgebase, new ticket rating and escalation, the list simply goes on and on but don’t just take our word for it. Watch the forums in the next 7-13 days when we ask for a limited number of beta users to help us test.

- We have added and in some cases replaced some new faces in the staff, sales, support, management. Our family is now 75 people deep and growing.

- Several new under and above the hood features designed with one goal, focus on quality assurance.

- New support ticket system, rating and tracking features, and extended coverage with more sys admins

- Entire new ordering system for both our site and existing clients using the client dashboard

- Deployed major new capacity for our r1soft backup service, added to every shared, semi-dedicated, failover, reseller, and VPS system we run.

- Expanded backup capacity again to reduce compression levels and increase restore times

- Rewards system coming with the new dashboard, earn cash and points for freebies and services

- Improved affiliates tracking and reporting

- All new Hybrid server plans, fully managed, packed with resources and features such as free cPanel for under $100.

- All new dedicated server plans with available managed services

- We’re bring back the basic hosting plan that first made Hostingzoom famous, beefing it up with all disk space you’d ever want, and tons of bandwidth to boot

- Reseller plans are all receiving a resource injection and al Advanced plans are now full semi-dedicated and unlimited accounts

- Windows plans are now available in much more varieties, also now with overselling and unlimited accounts as well

- Expansion of our VPS offerings in both features, plans, and upgrade options

- All new dedicated server plans, next up on our agenda witht them ; kvm, remote reboot, and rapid deployment

- All new and extensive addon/ upgrade options for all our services

- New BBB charter membership, we hope you’ll never need to use it but we welcome you to. We ask that you first contact me or a member of management if you encounter a problem that normal escalation procedures don’t fix

- All new higher spec servers have been, continue to be, and wiil be used on all new orders. RAID, 4-16gb ram, r1soft backups, and lower users per system.

- New improved Failover hosting technology that has a proven track record, and again, lower users per cluster

- New knowledge base Wiki :   http://www.hostingzoom.com/wiki/

- Improved server monitoring and reporting, soon to include every dedicated and vps with settings you can edit to watch for, be alerted to

- All servers have been extensively inspected and locked down better to reduce spam and blacklisting issuses. Procedures for fixing known issues have been vastly improved.

- New backup addon available to any shared, semi-dedicated, failover, reseller, vps, or dedicated (if subscribed to backups) can access, restore, and manage their own data right from our own r1soft backup nodes. For just $2/mo. !

- Ruby on Rails , Webdav, and a handful of other popular requested features have been deployed for free. Just open your cpanel control panel and start using them now.

- Working on improving the speed and accuracy of account setups, upgrades, and feature requests

- To help celebrate these changes we have all new and matching site designs coming any day now , check back often

And the list goes on but I’ll save the details for our newsletters, watch the presses! We’re very grateful for all the loyal clients that have taken Hostingzoom, Resellerzoom, and Modvps to these heights. We look forward to a banner year in 2009.  We encourage all our clients to engage us in our forums anytime. We’ll see you theere!

Howdy Zoomers,
First an introduction and background check. My name is Greg Landis, Im the CEO of Landis holdings, Inc. A Houston, TX based company. Most of you already know Kiet Duong, CEO of HostingZoom, but you might not know that me and Kiet have been neighbors for some time. Our companies grew under similar circumstances, offering similar products, and from the same city here in Houston. We even share the same colocation facilities and product vendors. In many ways, too many to list, our companies were always siblings and we often spoke of ways the two might benefit one another.

Those talks grew and grew over the months until we realized we are already aligned so we made it official. All of our companies are already very profitable, and very reputable. In this agreement Kiet will remain on in his same executive level and power, with a new title. Thats as far as the changes go, we have zero plans to move, alter, or upset clients in any fashion.

We do have some awesome benefits for all the companies under our corp umbrella though. Lets go over how some of these are already being deployed and which ones are coming and how far out they are. Me, Kiet, Dylan, Les, Masood, Vlad, and other key members of HostingZoom/ResellerZoom/ModVPS have been laying out plans and discussing client needs and the main wish list. The even better news is we don’t plan to pick one, instead we have the unique opportunity to do them all. Thanks to these companies being profitable we have no need or desire to upset any flow thats working well.

Personnel
There are some great and talented people behind the entire staff here and we plan to keep them all. In fact since August this year Landis Holdings has been hiring new staff at an incredible rate. The technical staff alone has grown almost 40% and we aren’t done adding to that yet. We have some big plans to offer incredible support features and options. We have also increased our development staff to help bring in some of the much anticipated requests of the clients from the forums and emails.

Operations
We do not plan to make any change in the flow of operations on any level that could negatively impact clients. Let me make it clear, there doesn’t need to be server migrations and data transfers, nothing will be shut off or stopped. All companies already operate smoothly and profitable, we do not wish to upset any of them in any way by imposing the policies of one over the other. Each has in place its own chain of command, staff, servers, and colo. There are some things we see people wanting though that we can now instantly provide over the next week, month, and I’m confident all before years end.

Bullet Breakdown

And to prove this all isn’t just talk, everything I just mentioned has already begun. Kiet and other independent parties and staff will concur, we are in here to put some polish on the place. Point by point:
- We already have hired several new workers and are agressively working to complete development improvements to scripts and features clients have been requesting
- We have already placed a massive order for the largest shipment of servers in all HostingZoom history. Brought in to load balance, offer new services, complete all backup promises within the next 30 days, offer additional vps and reseller options, and more.
- All new servers are equipped with 4gb to 16gb ram, RAID-10, and many extras to be stored in our onsite offices.
- R1soft licenses are ready and awaiting the arrival of our equipment to engage all backups right now
- Me and several others have been actively engaged with the forum community already.
- Kiet, myself, other members of management and all the HZ staff are now and will continue to always actively be engaged with the clients and operations.

Im posting my email for anyone that needs to reach me, Greg@hostingzoom.com . Most of you already know Kiets, Kiet@hostingzoom.com and we both welcome any comments you have to offer.

Thanks, Im looking forward to meeting you all in the forums.