Yesterday was an interesting day. I decided to upgrade my Hostgator shared hosting account to a reseller account. Now that the migration and upgrade is complete, I’m REALLY glad I did. Its a little more expensive than the standard Baby Croc ($24.99 versus the $9.99/mo plan), but this really sets me up for growth and gives me a whole lot more control and visibility into whats going on with my sites. Plus I just might be able to have my hosting paid for by doing a bit of reselling!
The upgrade went fairly smooth and I really have to thank the folks at Hostgator. They are extremely good at what they do, fast and very professional. You see when you go from a shared hosting account to a reseller account they have to basically do a fork lift move of your entire account, files, databases and everything and move it to one of their bigger clustered servers.
The upgrade can happen in one of two ways. They can either create a brand new account on a new server all by it self. This would essentially augment your existing shared hosting account and you could move sites over at your leisure. The second option would be to move your entire existing shared hosting account at once over to be an account of its own under your new reseller account. This was the option I chose. They move all of you files and databases to the new account. You verify that everything is working correctly and then swing your dns settings for your sites to point to their new ip address.
The biggest key to a big move like this is to verify your sites are working BEFORE you change your DNS. This is so important to avoid any down time. And verifying your sites are working is very easy to do. All you have to do is edit your host file on your laptop or desktop to point to the new ip address.
Not to get too technical on you, but every computer has what is called a host file. On Windows machines this file is located in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Its just a simple text file and can be viewed or edited with notepad. Here is what one looks like.
# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp. # # This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows. # # This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. # entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address # be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host # The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least # space. # # Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on indiv # lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol. # # For example: # # 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server # 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host # localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself. # 127.0.0.1 localhost # ::1 localhost
In this file every line begins with a “#” sign. A “#” sign means that this is a comment and tells the system to ignore the line. At the end of the file there are two lines for locahost. Right after these is where you can enter your new ip address and domain name for the site you want to test. Hostgator sent this information to me in an email when the migration was complete.
So for example, when I tested my blog I put the following at the very end:
174.132.194.222 www.www.joesinternetmarketing.com
Then I go back to my browser and pull up my site. Your browser will look to the host file FIRST before it looks to DNS to resolve your domain name, so this new address will be the one that you can see. This is very cool because you can test the new account all while the rest of the world still goes to the old location (the old ip address)
For the most part the biggest issues I had were with database user permissions and in two case my existing database user name was too long and had to be shorten to be fewer than 16 characters.
Now that my new resellet account is all setup I ready to go. I can now be a full fledged hosting provider or just use my reseller account to have more flexibility and security with my websites.
Here are just a couple of reason why you would want to have a reseller account.
- More disk space
- Bandwidth
- You can also put each of your sites in their own account
- You don’t have to deal with addon domains
- If your account gets hacked they only have access to that one site.
- Skeleton files to automatically create new accounts with WordPress (or any other software )already installed and configured the way you want it!
Are you considering upgrading to a reseller account? Do know of some other reasons you would want a reseller account? Do you have some good reasons NOT to? Leave a comment and let us know. Comments bring website to life. We would love to hear from you!
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