For example, you can forward all messages sent to billing@yourdomain, sales, and marketing all to the same address: tom@yourdomain. That way, Tom will handle those email messages accordingly without having to check each of those accounts separately.

Most web-based control panels have support for mail forwarding built into them. If, for some reason, you do not have that option, you can create forwards manually. To forward email from one address to another, use email aliases. To create aliases, edit the /etc/aliases file and add lines like the following:

billing: tom

That will forward all mail sent to “billing” to “tom”. Once you have created your alises, save the aliases file and run: “newaliases” from the command line.

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Many content management systems, such as Joomla, have mass email features built-in that allow you to easily send mail to your users. Usually, they will present you with two options: PHP Mail or SMTP. PHP Mail essentially calls a particular PHP function that will contact your mail server (such as Sendmail or Postfix) to send the email. SMTP functions just like a regular email client and will login to an email account.

From personal observation and the advice of people who have tried it, unless you have some pressing reason to avoid SMTP, you should prefer it over PHP Mail. Although you may not notice the difference for small mailing lists, something larger can bog down your server when using PHP Mail. It works fine for occasional contact forms, but for mass emailing, you should just go directly to the source: your mail server.

It is crucial to your website’s success to have a host that offers support, and having a wide variety of support options to choose from is certainly a plus. Some useful support options are:

Email – Check for low response time. You don’t want a host that takes a week to answer emails.

Support tickets – Similar to email, response time is critical.

Chat – Some hosts offer online chat directly from their websites. Test it out to see how often they are online and how quickly they offer support.

Telephone – Although phone communication is less common these days, it is still needed. When you call, do you get a recording, a call center, or an actual technician?

Knowledge base and/or FAQ – Whether it takes the form of a wiki or some other publication, a web host can save itself and you a lot of time by publishing answers to frequently asked questions.

Forums and Community – Big hosts have the advantage of having a large body of users. Some provide forums so that those users can communicate and support each other. Sometimes, this is even faster than traditional support methods.

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1. If you are going to automatically add users after a sale transaction, make it clear on the order form, and give customers the option to opt out.

2. Provide an opt-out link at the bottom of each email.

3. Send as few message as possible. Once a month is reasonable. Once a week may be overkill. Once a day will land you in spam folders.

4. Make sure your opt out script actually works. I cannot tell you how many times I have unsubscribed from some lists only to be added again.

5. Just because someone is involved in an organization does not give you the right to add them. As someone who works in publishing, I have been added to numerous lists, because they assume I am interested in what they have to say.

Finally, always make sure your message are relevant. People who actually do sign up for your gardening mailing list do not want messages about iPhones. Stay on topic and be respectful.

Both can potentially present security issues. An email address presented in text can be harvested by spam bots. A contact form can be hacked and used to send spam or gain access to the server. But both can be prevented with extra security measures. Furthermore, both can be setup to point to the same email account on your server.

The real advantage for contact forms is that you can customize them and lead users to provide certain information. This could help them formulate ideas and come up with better questions. You can also gain certain useful data from them that might help determine how best to assist them. Finally, a contact form script that collects statistical data can help you when it’s time to evaluate your website. Ideally, it is probably best to provide both options, just in case a user prefers one over the other.

Some websites, particularly those owned by organizations or companies, may use a catchall feature on their mail server. Rather than create an email address for several departments, they may create five and have all other inquiries forwarded to a single address. For example, billing@domain.tld, finance@domain.tld, and stocks@domain.tld may all be handled by the same department. Rather than have an alias for each, the catchall for that domain could point to billing. This can also be useful for catching typos.

There are drawbacks to catchall email settings. Since any email address that does not have a valid mailbox will be accepted and forwarded to the specified account, your account might receive more spam. Some spam bots will seek out keywords like “admin” and “support” and automatically send spam to accounts on your domain with those prefixes. Individual website owners and small organizations will probably not see the benefits of catching extra spam.

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For mail transport, MailScanner requires a mail server such as Sendmail or Postfix. For Anti-Virus, it relies on ClamAV or one of the many other supported solutions, and for Spam, it uses SpamAssassin. It creates a centralized control mechanism for all of these applications and acts as a mail sorter, filtering out the junk.

MailScanner is available for most major Linux distributions and several Unix-like operating systems, such as Solaris and BSD. The website provides binaries for Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, and SuSE, and nearly all distributions provide packages in their repositories. MailScanner is free and open source software, released under the GPL.

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There are many customer management tools on the market, but not all of them are catered to web hosting. In particular, the best way to make sure payments are received on time is to have some type of recurring billing setup. Hosting is usually relatively inexpensive, and most customers will not mind having a small amount deducted from their credit cards or PayPal accounts each month.

The other important aspect of customer management is communication. Keep in regular contact with your customers. Many conflicts that happen when dealing with people online are the result of misunderstandings. With email, social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and your website’s blog, you can stay in contact with your customers without being overly invasive. Welcome to the world of web hosting, and good luck.

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1. Login to cPanel on your website (usually something like http://yourdomain.com/cpanel)

2. Under the “Files” section, click “Backups”

There are several backups to choose, all of which will download the files to your computer. If you want automated scheduled backups and/or remote backups, choose another option.

3. To generate a full backup of your website, click the first button.

Optionally, you can choose to backup only a portion of your site, such as home directory, MySQL database, email forwards, or email filters.

4. Click the button of the component you want to download. Your browser’s save dialog should appear offering you a file in tar.gz format, which is a commonly used Linux form of file compression.

Backups are very important, and if you are unable to schedule routine automated backups, this convenient manual backup is a good option.

If your web hosting customers opt for the latter, you have some things to consider. POP3 and IMAP offerings are a given, but if your customers want a web-based option, you will need to provide one. Some hosting control panels come with web-based email solutions. If you have that option, use it.

If you do decide to install your own web-based email, make sure you choose secure, well-tested software that is easy to upgrade and maintain. The last thing you want is to have to manage poorly written software and spend your time fighting off hackers who exploit its security holes. Finally, make sure that things like quota control limits are easily enforceable and that the server load is not too high. You and your clients will hopefully be happy with the results.

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