As a Heart Internet dedicated server customer you have got access to a range of products and features. Here are a few ideas to help you get the most out of your dedicated server.
Manage: cPanel
Manage every aspect of your dedicated servers needs through this easy to use interface. cPanel provides users with an easy to use GUI along with a powerful set of tools that let you manage all the functions of your dedicated server quickly and easily. Only £20 per month.
Secure: Server back-ups
A dedicated server comes a greater emphasis on personal responsibility with the software being run on your dedicated server and keeping the information safe. Essentially, we provide the hardware and connectivity and what you then do with it is your choice.
In the same way we offer cPanel as a paid extra to administer your server (which also comes with a back up function), we offer back up services for dedicated servers for only £10 a month for 10GB space or £50 a month for 100GB space which is peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
Communicate: Hosted Exchange
Increase your productivity and profitability by choosing business Email hosting solutions powered by Microsoft Exchange Email 2010. With Exchange Server 2010 you have the freedom to securely access all of your Email from virtually any platform, web browser, or device to get more done, wherever you are. For only £10 per month, it includes free Outlook 2010, 4GB storage, data synchronisation and full data back-up.
Sell: SSL certificates
A highly encrypted SSL certificate will help you to take online payments securely without a third-party merchant, reducing your costs and increasing payment options for customers. Even if you are storing data rather than requesting it, an SSL certificate prevents data being intercepted when it is being accessed by authorised users. We have a range of certificates to choose from, with prices starting at just £49.99 per year.
Mobile: Mobile website builder
While your existing website is aimed at giving a full and comprehensive picture of your business, a goMobi mobile site allows you to deliver immediate access to what matters most when on the go. Quick and easy to set up, goMobi gives you all the tools you need to create a site specifically optimised for mobile phones The two sites are complimentary and work together with automatic device detection to make sure your customers are getting the most appropriate experience for their context and their device.
Pricing examples (per month):
cPanel:£20
Back-ups:£10
Hosted Exchange:£9.99
SSL certificate:£4.16 (£49 per year)
Mobile website builder:£3.99
Total per month:£48.14
How to buy
Log in to your customer control panel and click on ‘Order Add-ons’. Choose which products you want to add to your basket and follow the order process through to the end.
Any thoughts on the managed option for dedicated servers?
A number of people i have spoken to about this have complained that they get great support when buying the server, but are then left in the cold after that without much knowledge of what they should be doing to keep things secure. They all comment on one thing – support on reseller is great, but virtually non existent on dedicated servers.
As a customer of yours, i have been on the brink of getting such a server for a long time, but such options have prevented me from doing so. The lack of knowledge (and time to learn) worries me that i will not keep my box as secure as i would like it to be. A managed option or perhaps a HI managed server with your extend control panel, would meet the simplicity of many of our needs, with the performance and power of a dedicated box that shared hosting cannot provide.
I do not know how hard it would be when creating a new account within reseller, to provision that to the users own box? I guess things like databases might be trickier / require changes – so maybe not feasible. But power with simplicity will see a lot of purchases i suspect.
Nice Artical Craig
I would love to do this BUT i think that I would mess it up with the clients I have…Too Scared ;-(
Davide
A dedicated server is a very different proposition to shared and reseller hosting, and it absolutely requires a lot more technical knowledge. On the one hand the freedom to do what you want with it is great, but that does mean we have to leave you to manage it yourself. The name “Dedicated sever” is very literal, we have no say in to the running ofa customer’s server (unless it is doing something illegal of course). We offer all the tools you need to try and make it as easy as we can (cPanel, back ups etc) but with great power comes great responsibility.
We currently have no plans to offer managed hosting as a service I’m afraid.
Cheers,
Matt
Somehow i feel you are stating very much what i did, yet dismissing the point i made about us not being able to do it.
If i had the ability to run my own server – then this would not be a problem.
However, i run a webdesign company. I know how to design and develop websites, and i often know that for 99% of these sites the Reseller Hosting you offer fits perfectly in the feature market – but i am competing with 2000 odd other websites on that server – hence on occasions there are issues.
My company wants a reputation of being good at what it does, we are proud of the work we produce, we would also like to be proud of the ongoing service we provide – i.e. through hosting. When we sell hosting for anything other than a small 5 page brochure site we warn clients that you are being hosted on a budget shared hosting environment, and the costs reflect this. What would be nice is the ability to offer a premium hosting environment, like that i would if i ran my own dedicated server.
However, we are not a hosting company, we are a design company. Although i personally have the technical abilities to learn and run a server, i also know that my knowledge is limited and potentially there are gaps in it that might result in security problems. In short, i know enough to know i can never claim to be an expert and as such if i was offering a premium hosting service – that would not be good enough.
You might be content with people being too naive to know they are not running the servers correctly, but that is not something i will do for my customers.
All this aside – my time is better spent doing what i know – design, not running a webserver.
I understand your stance that many people want dedicated servers to run very specific setups, custom software, programs, apps, etc. I agree, there are many such people out there. I am not claiming that i am or am not one. I have clients with specific needs, and these would be tailored to exactly.
What i am trying to say is there are many websites out there that do not need custom setups, specific software, tailored solutions – just a better performing hosting environment than shared could ever offer. The small to medium sized sites running ecomm or CMS’s, etc. This is a market that currently designers like myself would have to push to a VPS of their own, or a hosting provider that offers premium shared hosting environments.
What i am suggesting is that the “premium reseller” style approach will allow me to be more content in serving better hosting for CMS and Ecomm solutions. In this case premium being a managed server environment, that is run correctly by people who actually know what they are doing, up to date with the industry, aware of new security issues – that many “designers” would not.
Maybe i know too much and therefore i am fearing this all too much. All i know is that i have seen many many design firms buy their own box, self manage it blind to the risks, resulting in huge problems down the line. I do not want to be seen as such a blind company. I want the pros to do what they do best and i will pay for that service.
Now how much we pay is the problem. If the dedicated box was managed as though it was a reseller – as mentioned above i would not expect a huge premium as this is just day to day as you would with the reseller account. However, if i then changed my stance and said, i need custom this and that, then i would completely expect to pay more for that – that is not default management, that is custom project work. It is a fine line, which many customers and businesses would struggle to define – so i understand it not to be easy. but…
In short, if i had the knowledge to run aserver i would, i would also setup a hosting company rather than a design agency. if you see my point.
Neil,
There are quite a few points there so I’ll take them one at a time…
<h4>Somehow i feel you are stating very much what i did, yet dismissing the point i made about us not being able to do it.</h4>
I was not doing this at all, I was simply explaining that becuase we don’t offer managed dedicated servers the customer needs to be able to administer the server themselves. Your personal technical comptency was not part of the point I was making.
<h4>You might be content with people being too naive to know they are not running the servers correctly, but that is not something i will do for my customers.</h4>
I’m unsure where this point of view comes from. We offer dedicated servers to anyone who wants them presuming a customer will buy the product that best suits them. We can’t vet every customer and decide for them what they should buy. At no stage do we ever pitch dedicated servers as being an easy alternative to shared hositng and we never miss-sell a server to a customer who doesn’t need one.
In the hosting world “managed hosting” would mean that we (Heart Internet) would run the server for you as if it were our own. I took your original comment about us offering “A managed option or perhaps a HI managed server with your extend control panel” to mean that.
Cheers
Matt
on a small note and i have said this in the past, when you resell cpanel you have to give free good support as part of the deal as cpanel give very slow and crap support for re-sold cpanel as per there ticket system
Matthew: I think what Neil was trying to ask for is an option as a Shared Hosting Reseller, to be able to promote an account to a server with less users.. perhaps an option for 2000, 500, and 1 contention ratio – as selection in a drop down box. Of course, Heart would charge a premium for this.
But the point is, instead of selling just a dedicated server, you simply join it to your shared hosting farm, so all your back-end scripts keep it patched etc, and provision it for a certain customer, at a premium.
So we don’t mean ‘managed’ as in a human manually inspecting it, but more via your already-polished server scripts you have for the main shared servers.
I’m a bit behind the time here, but i just wanted to say that i agree with the comments here. I love the Heart Extend control panel, the Hostpay integration and all the other features of the shared reseller hosting package. The only thing i don’t like is the consistently slow speed of the servers. I would love a package where we could pay extra to have the same reseller package but on a dedicated server, or at least a server shared between a reduced number of customers. I would even be happy with a limited amount of space for the price. I hope this is something you would look at doing. I wouldn’t have thought this would be a huge amount of work to implement as you are running all your other servers this way already, just allow people to rent a server to themself for a higher price.
hi Paul, please fill out a ‘Your Feedback’ form from the customer control center in heart. Take your time and make it count. I hope it does. I’ve done the same. Heart seem like a vacant company – zero R&D just taking money.
I’ve already mentioned it on a feedback form actually, hoping that they can do something in the near future.
In fairness to Heart, I’ve found them quite responsive to requests made through the feedback form in the past. I’ve suggested a few little tweaks to Hostpay in particular that have happened a couple of months later. For example, I mentioned that we badly needed to be able to process renewals for customers without manually logging into their control panel, and this was done. In general I’ve never been able to fault the support and service I get from Heart, with the exception of the slow server speed which is a constant issue for us. It’s a shame nothing seems to be being done about this as it’s the one thing that makes me look jealously at other providers.
Hi Paul, have you raised a ticket about server speed? If you have, please let me know the ticket ID and I will escalate it to our Customer Services Manager. Thanks 🙂
I’ve raised a few in the past. The problem is that the speed issues tend to be intermittent. So for half an hour i’ll be developing a website and it’ll be stupidly slow (15-20secs for the server to respond. When the server does respond, the page comes up quickly though). However, by the time i’ve submitted a ticket and the support guys have got back to me, the problem tends to have gone away. But it does keep happening. Next time i have a problem i’ll get a ticket in straight away.
Hi Paul,
Those kinds of issues tend to be hard to pin down, but if you drop us a tweet @heartinternet or comment here on the blog next time you raise a ticket about it, I’ll make sure a manager reviews it for you.
Hi James,
Thanks for directing Paul to the feedback form. Take a look at the major things we launched in 2011 in this post: https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/the-new-products-features-we-launched-in-2011/ We’re always adding to and updating our services 🙂 You can see the various posts on the blog for updates and additions we’ve made so far this year, with lots more planned.
Some of the new things this year so far are:
https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/resellers-new-marketing-resources-added-to-the-rcc/
https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/new-reseller-feature-accounts-added-removed/
https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/protect-your-website-and-your-reputation-with-stop-the-hacker/
https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/build-beautiful-websites-in-minutes-with-new-sitedesigner/
https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/new-feature-add-social-media-usernames-to-your-account/
Those are in addition to everything we do that’s ongoing, such as keeping over 66 one click installs for Windows and Linux updated, managing and adding to our HostPay Wiki, researching new one-clicks to add, all the things that are too small to mention such as adding and editing pages and updating the control panels, and all our normal services.