Providing Advanced Web Hosting Services

Resellers should offer advanced services to consumers who require state-of-the-art web hosting and performance. Advanced services are defined as high-end, complex IT infrastructures. They are not normally purchased by small or mid-sized businesses because of the breadth of their scope and their prohibitive cost.

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Advanced services are thus normally reserved for larger organizations that require such options as redundancy and quality-of-service (QoS). Resellers can benefit by reselling these services to larger organizations in their capacity as an IT consultant. As a knowledgeable consultant, resellers can determine the specific requirements of their clients and recommend a solid and sophisticated solution after an in-depth assessment. Often larger organizations are seeking content delivery services, streaming media services or firewalls and virtual private networks, which Web hosting resellers can locate and provide to them for a marked-up fee or for a commission.

Content Delivery Networks

Many companies seek content delivery solutions in order to enhance their Web content's redundancy and efficiency. Content delivery networks (CDNs) accelerate Web sites by redirecting Web traffic to devices located near the audience. These devices may be located on the networks of many service providers, and involve using the edge computing capabilities to move content closer to the actual user. CDNs are popular because they assist larger organizations to deal with an immediate influx of demand for their online content, and ensures that their online content takes a faster route to their client. CDNs is regularly employed to not only improve public Web content, but to support content delivery on corporate LANs or WANs within a company's firewall.

Streaming Media

Streaming media is also another popular advanced service which resellers can offer. Streaming media provides an alternative way for corporations to deliver content, either through offering video-on-demand or webcasting. Streaming media applications continue to grow in the technology marketplace because the market penetration of broadband connections is greatest in the corporate sector. For this reason, streaming media services are an excellent product to offer larger corporations.

Virtual Private Networks & Firewalls

A virtual private network (VPN) is essentially a system that allows two or more private networks to be connected over a publicly accessible network, such as the Internet. It usually consists of an encrypted tunnel of some kind, although a VPN can take several forms, using different combinations of hardware and software technologies. VPNs can exist between an individual machine and a private network, or a remote LAN and a private network.

Firewalls act as gateways between two separate networks. This gateway generally exists between a corporate network and the Internet. The firewall is set up to let a pre-determined group of people on to the network while keeping others out.

Recently, corporations have tended to outsource both VPN and firewall services, or obtain the services of IT consultants if intent on provisioning such services in-house. VPNs and firewalls therefore constitute a great opportunity for resellers as a suite of services which can be concurrently offered along with Web hosting or ancillary IT services such as CDN or streaming media.