Ricky’s Online Business Blog

This is a general guide for my customers who are hosting their domain names with BizPartner.

Say your domain name is YourDomain.com, your web and email hosting plan enables you to create email accounts like anyone@YourDomain.com and put up a web site at http://www.YourDomain.com.

Creating Email Accounts

You can create email accounts using the web-based control panel given.  It is at http://www.YourDomain.com (cPanel users) or http://mailadmin.YourDomain.com (MailAdmin users).

For cPanel users, please login and click Email Accounts icon to create new email accounts.  Once you have done this, you can start using the email service via webmail at http://www.YourDomain.com/webmail.  You can also set up your email software (such as Outlook) so that you can send and receive emails from your computer.  Please refer to the “Server Configuration” email sent to you for details.

For MailAdmin users, please login and click Users button on the left to create email accounts.  You can access webmail at http://webmail.YourDomain.com.  Please also refer to the “Server Configuration” email sent to you on setting up your email software in your PC.

Creating Web Site

Developing a web site is not an easy task.  You can either outsource web development to web developers, or try to do it yourself using many free content management software (CMS) out there.

By using a CMS, you don’t need to possess too much technical knowledge to make up a web site.  Popular CMSes are such as WordPress (easiest) , Drupal, Joomla, Xoops, and OS Commerce (for e-commerce web sites). You don’t have to download these software but simply install any of them in cPanel.  Click Fantastico in cPanel to find out more.

Using CMS to create a web site requires a little learning curve.  But once you have mastered it, you can replicate your skills to create other web sites as well.  For many business and personal web sites, actually creating a blog is quite a good choice.  You can use WordPress to do so.  Find out how to use WordPress to develop your web site.

You can also use web development software such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage to create your web site.  How easy are these?  If you know how to use Microsoft Word, it does not take you much time to learn Microsoft Frontpage.

But if you prefer to hire a web designer to do up your web site, there are thousands of them interested in your job.  You may want to try engage a web designer among my partners here. (If you are a web designer reading this, you are welcome to join as a partner too)

Hosting Your Web Site

When you are ready to put up your web site on the server, you can do this by using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service provided as in the “Server Configuration” email sent to you. You will need an FTP software to do the job.  Recommended is FileZilla (free). Another way to upload is by Windows Explorer as described here.

If you use software such as FrontPage to design your web site, you can also upload or publish your web site straight from the software itself.

Hope this little article help.  If you face any problem, welcome to contact me here

I am privileged to have an existing customer happily hosting one of their web sites with me.  Recently the boss told his staff to transfer all their domain names and hosting under me.

However, the other hosting provider, actually their outsource web developer, would not budge.  He claimed the web sites make use of certain ASP.NET components not normally available on other servers.

Fair enough.  I asked for a list of ASP.NET components required.  Perhaps they really need to stay with him.  But after checking the list, those are just standard components supported on most if not all servers.

Finally, the web developer agreed to let customer go, but not without a “transfer fee” charged for the trouble to transfer their web sites and email accounts to the new server (which I would help do for customer free of charge if given all necessary server login details).

However, after some consideration, the customer decided not to pay the “transfer fee”, not because of money, but because of principle.  Maybe.  But I suspect another reason being the fact that their web sites are under the control of the developer.  They have to rely on the web developer to access and update their web sites.

After all, the web developer has been doing a good job maintaining their web sites.  From customer’s point of view, why switch to me if there is not much compelling reason to switch over to me?  But from my point of view, it is another typical case of customer web sites and hosting being hijacked by provider.

.my DOMAIN REGISTRY (formerly MYNIC) is giving away 50% discount for all .my domain name registration until 4th September 2009!

• .com.my, .net.my, .org.my – RM40, discounted from RM80
• .my (second-level domain) – RM60, discounted from RM120
• .name.my – RM16, discounted from RM32

Customers always ask me why .my domain names are more expensive than the international .com domain names.  But now that .my domain prices have dropped, there is not much difference now.  You can take advantage of it here!

Any price reduction is good news for us consumers.  I suspect .my DOMAIN REGISTRY (formerly MYNIC) may not go back to the high price tag of RM80 any more, even after the promotion period.

After all, it happened before.  Years ago, the then MYNIC had a similar promotion to reduce the original price of RM100 to RM80, and then decided to stay put with RM80 after the promotion and never went back to RM100!

It will be good for .my domain prices to drop to level similar to those of the international domain names such as .com.  The price reduction makes our .my domain names more competitive in the international market.

Domain name resellers and hosting providers have no option but to follow suit and reduce the prices in accordance to the promotion.  After all .my DOMAIN REGISTRY (MYNIC) sent out emails to all .my customers to inform about it!

However, a quick check on a few hosting providers’ web sites show that some of them have not yet updated their published domain prices to the lower prices.  I don’t know whether .my DOMAIN REGISTRY (MYNIC) had given them ample time to prepare for the promotion or not.

But as for me, I only received the news on 16th July, just 4 days before the start of promotion period!  It would have been better if I could know this earlier to prepare for it.