This could be a more general question not just for web hosts but for webmasters who provide on-call support for clients.

If you are a one man band, what do you do with your clients when you want to go off the grid for a while and take a holiday?

Do you outsource responsibility to a trusted business partner?

I think the most feasible solution is to maintain some kind of contact with the on-goings of your business. Most hotels and resorts offer some kind of computer room - so that should be easy enough. Of course, a business partner - or a trusted friend that knows their stuff - can also work. Also, I think it's important to let your clients know that support may be slow for a little while. Offer them a short explanation and I'm sure most of them will be understanding.

In other words you cant really take a vacation.

Originally Posted by TWD

In other words you cant really take a vacation.

I guess that's true to a certain extent. Most small businesses however should manage with just a few employees, or a business partner.

If you are a one man band, what do you do with your clients when you want to go off the grid for a while and take a holiday?

If you are one person provider you will not have vacation at all. Unless you agree to lose some customers.

Originally Posted by TWD

In other words you cant really take a vacation.

Yup, in the sense of not working at all. But, for this type of business, you can be mobile and work, which is an advantage.

It definitely not unheard of for people owning a small hosting business to have years without a vacation at all. I guess this provides an incentive to grow the company big enough and fast enough so that employees can get a vacation without disrupting the business.

Taking a vacation can be a great way to test the "emergency" plans, which you should have in place anyhow. It can happen to anyone to require a forced vacation in the hospital, possibly unable to work in any fashion.

If your hosting business is your livelihood, you need to make sure that a personal disaster doesn't result in losing your income too. Having some partners, or maybe your upstream provider, ready to take over the day to day running of the business (support, server management, if not even sales) is very important, once the business has enough value.

While im not in the hosting business I do come across similar issues while running a business that relies on server uptimes, databases and payments.

I find the best thing is to AUTOMATE as much as possible!

For instance if you have shared linux servers, Why not have some cron jobs that checks if a service is working. If it isnt, Try restarting the service .
If it still fails, Send a mail to you.

90% of the time, Simple scripts to do your housekeeping for you will wok perfectly.

also, if your about to go on holiday, Make sure you dont update ANYTHING for 7 days beforehand.

that way you know if its all stable when you leave, The chances are it will still be stable when you get back.


1) AUTOMATION!
2) Careful planning.

Hello,

This is a great question!

If you are currently running the company by yourself it is probably best not to go on vacation. Saying that it will greatly depend on what type of customers you host. Some of our customers have not once opened a support ticket. If all of our customers were like that we would only have to worry about managing the server.

If you really want to take a vacation this is what I suggest:

- As lynxus said try and automate everything you can. If you're using WHMCS that's a bonus as it has so many tools and modules to automate tasks.

- If you have a smart phone (I.e iphone, blackberry) make sure you have all of your email accounts setup correctly. Download an SSH app if one if available. This will allow you to control so many aspects of your business from your phone.

- If you are running WHMCS I highly recommend buying the mobile version. While using the mobile version isn't practical it will allow you to do allot on the move so to speak.

- If you can take your laptop with you! By doing this it won't be much different that running your business from home. The only difference will be the higher cost internet connection.

- You could also outsource support. This doesn't mean that you can forget about your business though. You should still be reading every support ticket and email you receive to make sure everything is running as planned.

Regards,
Jack

If you have to monitor the servers constantly then it's probably time to get new servers/systems.

In reality we spend less than two hours a week "actually doing anything", firewalls handle the suspicious activity, services auto restart etc etc.
Wireless and mobile internet services now make it simple to spend five or ten minutes checking logs no matter where you happen to be.

Do you have laptop? Take it and go to the vacation. That is recommended

The laptop will be not enough for monitoring your web servers. I guess the best plan for you if you are small company when I guess you could outsource some of your support and monitoring (I wouldn't outsource server management). We have had few outsource companies those have worked in our support. Well we only good thing they could answer is that administrator shortly will respond to their ticket but if you really desperately need vacation then teach somebody to be your support guy so that if by mistake you will oversleep or smth it is handy to teach somebody and run web hosting business with more persons trust me it will cost, but the results are better...

For server monitoring just install something like cacti on a server and it will email you when it goes down or something goes over its threshold.

But like i said before, a couple of scripts to restart services and check a few things are running correctly is all you really need. ( or should need )

We use Nagios. It has more features comparing to Cacti, but needs more advanced knowledge about some programming and server administration stuff.

I believe if you hire someone for this time that would be the best and the easiest option.

Everyone needs a break once a while. So that is not an option. Now most corners of the globe do have internet access so you should be able to access your servers. Connect speeds can be slow and at times do pose a problem. If you go to your destination by air and you have a long flight then you will not be accessible during the flight. Hopefully more and more airlines will start offering Wifi in the cabin.

So if you are on a tight budget you will do the above and manage. If you do not want to take any chances you would outsource the server management while gone.

All of this points me to one conclusion.

I can't understand why any client would want some two penny operator to be responsible for providing web hosting.

There are plenty of big companies around (Blue Host, HostGator) that provide 365 x 24/7 support at low cost.

Seriously, would you buy your electricity supply from some guy down the street with a power generator in his basement?

So why rely on the same type of vendor for a utility that is just as important - your hosting.

I am a developer not a hosting provider. I always tell my clients that they are crazy to want or expect me to also provide their hosting needs. In good conscious I can't offer it.

On top of which, hosting administration is a specialized discipline.
You need knowledge of Linux, Apache and what have you and need to stay on top of upgrading your system architecture.
Why would you expect a web designer or PHP developer to have those skills?

I can't understand why any client would want some two penny operator to be responsible for providing web hosting.

I believe end users do not know what kind of support they get.

I am a developer not a hosting provider. I always tell my clients that they are crazy to want or expect me to also provide their hosting needs. In good conscious I can't offer it.

Sign up for the affiliate program and refer all of your customers to the certain web host earn money and let web hosting company take care of your customers. Good luck.

Originally Posted by SiberForum

Sign up for the affiliate program and refer all of your customers to the certain web host earn money and let web hosting company take care of your customers. Good luck.

That's what I am already doing. Thanks.

Originally Posted by TWD

That's what I am already doing. Thanks.

What company have you signed up with?