Spinoza

Hi folks. Not been on in a while.

I have a question for all you web designers who host your client websites:

Do you ever wonder whether it's worth the hassle?

I've been reseller hosting for a while now. A managed VPS with a couple of dozen client accounts. That might seem small by some standards but it's recurring income and it's been helpful. Yet I'm starting to wonder whether it's really worth it in terms of the stress and time.

I suppose this is one of those 'is it just me?' questions, so here's my feeling about it.

Much of the problem I think is the knowledge deficit. I try to get up to speed with what I need to, but I am never quite sure what that level is. I am not an expert in hosting, I am a front end designer who runs his own business. With everything from SEO to Adwords to print production to Wordpress to ecommerce to RWD to day-to-day business stuff - and trying to be sh1t hot in as many of those things as possible - I simply don't have the hours in the day to become acquainted with every last option in WHM or to know how to command line my way into tasks. And frankly I don't feel comfortable with the risk and the implications of getting it wrong.

As someone offering hosting, sometimes that makes me feel… well, if not a fraud, then at the very least, out of my depth.

Sure the VPS is managed, and by a good reputable company, so that helps. Support is good. But obviously it's not instant and I'm often wary of sounding like an out-of-his-depth amateur to the support guys too, so I try not to ask how to do things that they might think Every Reseller Should Know How To Do.

You know those heart-pounding, stomach-churning moments when the server goes down or there's some network problem and you know that you're very quickly going to be speaking on the phone to clients before having the faintest clue what the cause of the problem is or whether you're even capable of fixing it in a timely manner? Those moments really suck. Maybe it's your lack of knowledge that has mucked something up, maybe it isn't. Who knows. That's when I start to question whether it's all worth it (the hosting and occasionally the big metaphysical question too )

Added to the stress, there's the time it takes to deal with the stuff - sometimes even things that turn out to be minor or mistakes on the clients' side can take a while and involve having to google endlessly. E.g. A client rings up saying they're having email problems. So you ask them a few questions and do all the obvious stuff - are they definitely on the internet? Can they receive mail? Send mail? What is the error message? Is anyone else in the office having the same problem? While they're saying this, you check they haven't exceeded their disk space or bandwidth quota, check their IP hasn't been blocked by your server firewall, check mail delivery reports and mail queue manager, you ask for their IP and get a traceroute done, perhaps their office IP has suddenly been put onto a policy block list? Is it an SMTP authentication error? They go into their Mail settings and start reading out what port is showing and which authentication details are listed and ask how to do this or that. You have Apple Mail and iOS Mail but you can't talk them through Android or Lotus Notes without googling so again you're struggling. Email problems always seem to take time to diagnose and often I find it's a cause I'm unfamiliar with and another new learning experience.

Let's try to ignore the stream of csf/lfd login failure daemon emails that pour into one of my inboxes that seem to arrive in greater and greater quantities making me wonder whether these blocked login attempts are normal or whether there's some security issue I've not tightened up...

Then there's the joy of hosting Wordpress...

I don't know. The downtime, the endless phone support, feeling like I'm never sufficiently up-to-speed. Maybe this is more about my own limitations, but is it normal to find all this stuff stressful and time-consuming and possibly -- here's the point -- not worth the hassle?

Sorry that was a bit of an essay. Think I've been needing to get some of this off my chest!

Hi,
 
Has anyone here built a responsive shopping site yet? If so, how did you find it? Any issues that you identified? What ecommerce solution did you use?
 
Also, can you offer any examples of other shopping sites built in this mobile-friendly way? (I can think of Currys/PC World and, um, that's about it... )
 
Currently a bit out of the loop when it comes to ecommerce software but I notice shopify are touting the mobile friendly element.
 
TIA