This certainly doesn’t sound like the title of a blog post you would expect from a client-centric company like WestHost. I was recently told about a new book entitled “The Best Service is No Service.” The concept is very fitting for the hosting industry. The vast majority of our clients want the ability to easily complete tasks on their own versus having to drop us an e-mail or pick up the phone and have us do it. Under the perfect conditions they never have to contact us because everything is easily available for them to do on their own.

A great non-hosting industry example of this is Verizon Wireless. If you go back approximately two years, the process for adding an additional cell phone line and activating it required two separate phone calls. They were miserable long calls, filled with legal contract recordings. While the agents generally offered very friendly service, as a customer it was still a dreaded experience. Today both of these tasks can be completed online in a couple of minutes and I’m a much happier Verizon Wireless customer because of it.

We recently completed a major upgrade to our infrastructure that improved a number of things in regards to this. But there is still a lot more we plan to do inside our control panel and billing system to allow clients to have the control they desire. This is what we’ll be working on over the next year. But what will not change is having our great client service team available 24/7/365 to back you up if you need our help. Expect to hear more details on our continuing upgrades in the coming months.

I’m pleased to announce that we have recently upgraded plan limits at WestHost! Existing clients on our standard or reseller Web hosting plans have received significant increases to disk space, bandwidth, and in some cases the number of e-mail accounts, for FREE. Some of these plans received upgrades that tripled or even quadrupled their previous amounts.

Dedicated server plans have also been upgraded, and now come with increased bandwidth. Existing dedicated server clients on the same payment options as our current dedicated servers plans will receive the increases to their bandwidth automatically.

In addition to the increase in standard plans, WestHost is also offering our Spring Special through May 31st for new accounts. The Spring Special offers some of the best disk space and bandwidth amounts we’ve ever offered!

As a growing company we are always looking for talented professionals to join our team. Over the past 10 years we have added many new employees to WestHost. We have expanded our company by adding new departments, as well as growing existing departments. It has been exciting to see new talent enter our company and help us to continue to provide industry leading Web hosting services to clients from around the world. With this tremendous growth over the years we have come close to reaching our building capacity in terms of office space at our corporate location. Because of this we have recently expanded our office locations. One example of this is a new satellite office in Salt Lake City Utah. This office expansion will help us to bring on experienced professionals from areas outside our corporate location.

As we work towards our main goal, to help businesses and individuals harness the power of the Internet, we desire to meet our growth needs with employees who have the knowledge, experience and character to meet our company goals and client expectations. Many of our clients have commented about the great support they receive from WestHost. In many instances, the quality of support they receive from us is unmatched within or without the Web hosting industry. In order to continue to meet these expectations, we will continue to grow well into the future. Surely our growth over the past 10 years in business has prepared us well for the next 10 years to come!

This has been an exciting year around WestHost for our talented and hard working team of employees. At our company Christmas party in December of 2006, it was announced that we would be giving away a BMW Z4 Roadster at our 2007 company Christmas party to one very lucky WestHost employee! With much anticipation throughout the year our staff has been excited for the drawing to finally be here. Employees have had the opportunity to earn ping pong balls during the year based on performance reviews, awards and other recognition. Those ping pong balls then went into a random drawing.

At our company Christmas party last night, the wait ended with a new set of car keys for one very excited employee who had one of their ping pong balls selected from the container. We would like to recognize and congratulate Jonny Fillmore who won the BMW! Jonny wasn’t able to be present at the party, so we called his cell phone to congratulate him on his new prize. While on speaker phone, Jonny responded with an unconvincing “you’re kidding”. After a few seconds realizing this wasn’t a joke, the shock began to set in and some laughter and “Wow” were conveyed. I’m sure Jonny will have a great time with the car as it fits him perfectly. Now he will just have to try and accommodate all the requests he will receive from co-workers, friends and family for a ride in his new car! Congratulations Jonny!

WestHost is pleased to announce that we now offer affiliates the ability to earn a $95 commission when referring clients that sign up for a dedicated server. This addition to the affiliate program has been one of the most frequently requested additions, so we’re certainly excited to fulfill this request.

If you’re an existing WestHost affiliate, we hope you’ll enjoy this new opportunity to make some additional commissions. We suggest you take some time to look over some of our dedicated server plans to familiarize yourself with our offerings.

If you’re not already a WestHost affiliate, feel free to sign up at our affiliate program page. There’s no monthly minimum payout, and you don’t necessarily need to be hosting your site with WestHost to be an affiliate.

This is not a question many people think about when selecting a hosting provider, but I believe it is something that should be considered. What happens when your Web site really starts to take off and you’ve outgrown the server resource limits of shared hosting? The last thing you want to worry about is whether your provider can meet your needs.

With many companies there simply is no option, and they will kindly ask you to leave. Several hosting providers offer dedicated servers, but that is not always an easy solution. Hosting providers run various control panels on their dedicated server offerings, and often there is no seamless way to make an upgrade. This requires DNS changes, re-uploading files, etc. You must also consider whether the dedicated server offering is managed by your hosting provider or if you are responsible for maintenance. Are you ready for the burden of being a systems administrator? Most people don’t have the time or experience to handle that responsibility.

At WestHost we are fully prepared to seamlessly accommodate your growth. Clients starting with our shared hosting packages can upgrade to our semi-dedicated offering. From there you can advance to a fully-managed dedicated server. Throughout each upgrade, you don’t have to lift a finger. There are no changing platforms or control panels. From start to finish WestHost maintains the responsibility of managing your hosting infrastructure.

Special thanks to everyone who participated in the ‘introduce yourself’ post from last week! We randomly drew from the comments added to that post and Barry Nordby was selected as the winner of the $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. Here’s the introduction he posted:

I was first recommended to WestHost seven or eight years ago and referred clients to their hosting. There wasn’t a reseller program then, so I started selling on other hosting services. After the company I was using was sold and the service and quality spiraled to an abysmal level which made for particularly difficult transition. During that time, I noticed WestHost now offered a reseller program. Since the site owners I had referred to WestHost always had good things to say, and since I was alway able to get quick and helpful service I was glad to be able to move to WestHost. Quality and service has and continues to be first rate. I love the easy to install programs. They help get things started, even though I can’t wait to upgrade some of the programs to the very latest release. I’ve been having fun using WordPress as a web site platform at http://www.adesignforlife.com/. Joomla is next!!

Thanks Westhost!
Barry

In August 2003, we launched our first VPS hosting platform (2.0). It was our goal to give current and prospective clients more control and features within their hosting account and still maintain a price point typically found in traditional shared hosting. At the time, the market definition of “VPS hosting” was still largely undefined. Many aspects of the offering qualified as what was know as VPS hosting, but one drawback was the fact our offering did not offer full root access. We chose to proceed by naming our offering VPS as full root access was not a consistent requirement at the time.

Fast forward to 2007 and the market definition of VPS is much more defined. True root access is now a primary requirement. When we launched our new 3.0 hosting platform this spring, there was discussion about changing the naming for this very reason. For better or worse we have chosen to hold off with any naming changes until we launch a high-end, root access VPS offering of our own. We still try to educate our clients up-front that WestHost’s VPS hosting does not offer true root access as shown here. We also try to make it clear of the benefits of our platform over traditional shared Web hosting. When you factor in the capabilities of a WestHost VPS, our reliability, support and the price-point, it’s still one of the best values out there, especially when you factor in the new enhancements of our 3.0 platform.

Take a few minutes to subscribe to our RSS feed and introduce yourself on our blog. Leave a comment that includes your Web site address and something interesting about your Web site. If you’re a current client, also tell us how long you’ve been with WestHost. On Monday, November 26th, we’ll draw randomly from the entries and send the winner a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com! Make sure you also include your first name and a valid e-mail address where prompted (your e-mail address will not be shown publicly) so we can contact you if you’re the winner. It could be the easiest $50 you ever made!

Seasons are changing, there is no doubt. There is no other place that this becomes more evident than in the WestHost Technical Support Department. With the decrease in the temperature outside we have seen an increase in the volume of contacts we see on a weekly basis. I suppose that it is inevitable, when people migrate indoors some will probably land behind a monitor and a keyboard. We are also approaching the holiday shopping season and reliability, preparedness, and tracking have become hot topics.

Recently we have seen an increase in questions regarding site statistics and how to best utilize some of our applications to analyze your site traffic. WestHost offers a great statistical application called AWStats. AWStats gives you excellent statistical information on who is visiting your site. As a Web master, you might use that data for the purpose of marketing or maintenance. For instance, AWStats tells you which search engine an end user used to find your site, and the keywords they typed in the search box. AWStats tells you how many visitors you’ve had over a given period of time, what pages they viewed, the browser they used, and a whole lot more. Many of you have asked if you can use AWStats to track multiple domains you have hosted within your single Virtual Private Server. The answer is yes you can. It is fairly easy. I will point out the key steps and common traps. I know that most of you don’t want to see anything too confusing, but would rather have a few things pointed out in plain English, so that is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll just go ahead and dive right in.

First of all, we need to have an idea of what AWStats really does on a fundamental basis. The application is going to parse the access logs that Apache keeps of all of the visitors to your site looking for visit information. From the chaos therein, it will create its own data files. Those data files will then be utilized to populate the pages that you see when you view your statistics. The problem is that by default, Apache will place all of the visit information into a single access log. Now that we understand what Apache and AWStats are going to do we can extrapolate what we need to do to accomplish our task. First we need to configure Apache to separate the access logs by domain and then AWStats to parse the separate logs accordingly. Simple enough right? Yep!

The first step is to configure Apache to write its separate access logs. This can be accomplished by editing the Apache configuration file, /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. If you open and review this file, it can look confusing. I certainly thought so the first time I opened it up for some “surgery.” Not to worry. If you handle directions like the average Joe, you won’t have any trouble. Now one thing that you have to consider is that Linux doesn’t really like to interact with configuration files that have been written or edited by a text editor that will write files in a DOS format. If you are a Windows user and are not editing this file right on the server, just use Notepad, upload the edited file and you should be just fine. You could also utilize the text editor built into File Manager to complete your editing. Now that you know which file we will be editing, and just how we are going to do it, you probably want a few examples. For simplicity sake I am going to utilize primarydomain.com and secondarydomain.com in my explanations. Once we have the config file open we will be looking for the VirtualHost entry for the secondary domain. It will be towards the bottom of the file and will look like this:

We are going to add a little something to it. We need to tell Apache that we want a custom log for this domain. We will be adding the CustomLog directive for this virtual host just below the DocumentRoot directive. Generally we will want to have the new logs written to the same directory as they would be by default, we would just want to write them to a new file name, maybe something like secondarydomain_access_log. Here is an example using the information above:

This entry will write the access log for secondarydomain.com to /var/log/httpd/ and it will be named secondarydomain_access_log. Once the file is modified and saved or uploaded, we will want to give Apache a nice gentle restart. This can be accomplished from within Site Manager or from the command line by issuing the “apachectl graceful” command. There is a catch to writing to separate access logs. By default they won’t be rotated. That may not sound like much but think about this, we have done such a good job to configuring Apache to write this log separately that it will happily do our bidding without question. Eventually our new log file will grow to an unmanageable size. We’ll need to talk about this later on. For now, let’s get back to our task at hand.

Now that we have got our logs separated, let’s tell AWStats what to do with them. We need new, separate config files for each of the newly separated domains. Relax, we have good templates to work with. The AWStats configuration files are located in /etc/awstats. Take a quick look at this directory. As long as you have installed AWStats you will see a file named awstats.primarydomain.com.conf. Let’s make this a simple as possible, just make a copy of that file, but name it awstats.secondarydomain.com and save it to /etc/awstats. Now on to the fun stuff, we need to edit our new file, open the file up and let’s get to work. The first directive we need to find is the log file directive. Look for a line like the example below:

As you can see by default this configuration will pull data from the standard log. Simply change this file to point to our new log file(s). Make it look similar to the example below.

Next we need to change the SiteDomain and HostAliases directives to reflect the secondary domain name rather than the primary domain name. They will look like this and will be on line 153 and 168 or there abouts:

Modify them to reflect the secondary domain.

Now just save any changes you made. There is no need to restart anything here but we do need to check our work. Let’s see just how good we did. First we need to give Apache something to log in our new access logs so open a browser and go visit your secondary domain. Then, navigate to your AWStats Web interface, http://primarydomain.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=primarydomain.com. You will notice that we specified which set of stats we wanted to view by passing the config variable in the URL. Lets view the statistics for our secondary domain now, navigate to http://primarydomain.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=secondarydomain.com. Upon initial access you may think that broke something. The statistics are not processed automatically. Not to worry, the developers of AWStats thought of this and provided us a link right at the top of the page to “update now.” Don’t hesitate, click that button, you know you want to. If all went well and you didn’t stress too much you should see a result that will contain stats that have been collected since we restarted Apache. Way to go! We are almost done.

Earlier I had made mention that the new access logs wouldn’t be rotated and eluded to the fact they would just continue to grow until they filled your disk space I also highly doubt that you want to click the “update now” button and wait for AWStats to finish updating each domain each time you want to view your statistics. Your account will already be scheduled for log rotation on a daily basis, that is unless you have edited your crontab. Ah yes, the crontab, what a wonderful tool, but we’ll leave that for another discussion. Back to logrotate, we simply need to ensure that our new logs and the AWStats updates for secondary domains are included. This is also pretty slick. We need to edit the logrotate.conf file located in the /etc/ directory. Crack it open, we’ll get this done really quickly. In that file, on about the ninth line you will see the entry for the primary access log. Here is an example:

Simply add your new access log files to the end of the line, but before the {

That will rotate our log files and manage their size. This will compress and archive our logs for a short period of time. Eventually logrotate will also delete the log files but only after adding our precious stats to the AWStats data files. Logrotate is a discussion for another time as well. Don’t close that file though, we aren’t done yet. There is one more entry we need to make to cause AWStats to update before the logs are rotated. Just below prerotate on about the 13th line of the file, you will see the following:

We need to insert a new line just below it and add our secondary domain name. Just make it look like this:

Save your changes and give yourself a pat on the back. We are done! AWStats will now show you stats separated by domain name. We have discussed a couple of simple changes, but those simple changes will provide you some significant information.