If you own a web design agency or if you are a web designer with clients under you, then the concept of reseller hosting may not be new for you.

In addition, entrepreneurs looking for a profitable hosting business, also go with reseller web hosting. That said, let us look at some basics of reseller hosting and see how this can benefit you.

In general, web design agencies opt for a good reseller hosting account. Here are a few reasons how this can benefit you:

1. Provide hosting with your name, your name servers etc. Branded hosting.
2. Billing that includes automatic collection of due amount from customer credit card.
3. Control panel for each of your client.
4. Allot preset Disk space and bandwidth for each client.
5. You focus on business and design aspects while your data center operator (from your “parent hosting” company- referred as “parent” henceforth in this article) maintains your infrastructure and hardware for you.
6. Remember, you always face the client direct and for your clients you run the hosting company and provide them support. But you always have support and backing from your parent company and can resolve issues amicably.

These are only some of the benefits of reseller hosting. Basically you can purchase a good reseller hosting account, brand it with your business name and start a hosting company pretty easily.

Many web designers successfully run a hosting business this way. You can rent or lease an entire server from a hosting company or purchase blocks of shared hosting.

Usually when you first start out, you will go with a shared hosting reseller account to keep costs down and once you become more successful with more paid hosting clients, you can go for a dedicated web server.

With cost of reseller hosting accounts so affordable, this is really a good solution for web designers with clients or web design agencies, not only for convenience and branding, but also for an extra revenue source.

With excellent best web hosting companies out there, you can find a very reliable reseller hosting company by doing good research. Happy hosting!

Things are moving along quite nicely here on Get Free Web Designs. As of this blog post we currently have 626 open source web designs available for free download and our community forum is getting some good use too.

So yeah, there isn’t too much else to say at this point. I just wanted to check in with everyone and say hello, so “hello”.

Thank you to everyone from the Open Source Web Design Community for your continued support, use and help with the site. Without you, Get Free Web Designs wouldn’t be the success it is today.

Early November 2008 I started a partnership with Aaron to build the site. We discussed what we should call the site, what do we want it to have or not have feature wise, example do we want a forum or designs only, etc.

At the same time, we discussed a road map for the site and began writing custom code from the ground up to make the site do what we wanted, but also be scalable for future plans and features.

Once Aaron and I had the road map in place, we setup a development server to begin our programming work, setup a basecamp to track everything we were both working on and also toyed around with a handful of “possible” names to call the site.

On November 27, 2008 I registered the domain name that would become the next Open Source Web Design site.

Approximately one year ago on December 8, 2008 we started private beta testing Get Free Web Designs with a few select designers.

The following day (Dec 9, 2008) after the start of our private beta testing, we launched our Top 10 Web Design Statistics page on the site. This was a very welcomed edition to the site from a lot of the designers.

December 18, 2008 the site reaches 106 free open source web design templates. Not bad for being in a private “invite only” beta.

Over the next few weeks or so Aaron and I did a lot of testing, coding, more testing and feature enhancements to the site and a few designers continued submitting designs to the site.

Early January 2009 we started working with Wolfram to make a custom web design for use on the site.

On February 1, 2009 we officially opened up the site to the public with 167 designs available to download. We wanted at least 100 and we passed that goal by almost double. We were very pleased.

February 12, 2009 the GFWD’s WordPress Widget was released. This widget allows you to display a feed of the most recent designs from Get Free Web Designs right on your blog or any WordPress powered site.

February 26, 2009 we launched our Free Design Resources page loaded with good tutorials on things like HTML, CSS and fancy graphic design work with Photoshop. The resources page has really grown the past year. Lots of good stuff on it.

Over the next few months a lot of things took place on Get Free Web Designs that I won’t recap here. I just want to highlight some of the more memorable things in this post. You can check out the GFWD blog for additional specifics.

August 22, 2009 we publicly announced that a community forum would be coming to the site. Of course the OSWD community was very pleased to hear this news, however the process of actually getting it launched had many delays as you will read on the blog.

September 26, 2009 after searching some old backups, I located the bakie smiley and it was added to Get Free Web Designs

December 6, 2009, about 3 months after announcing we would have a forum on the site, we finally got it launched and opened a 24 hour “invite only” beta testing phase.

The following day on December 7, 2009 the forum was linked up on the site and made public to everyone.

So there you go, a pretty complete recap of what’s taken place since Aaron and I launched the site over a year ago.

As of today and this post, we have 577 free open source web designs available for download, a new community forum and a bright future ahead of us.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support over the years with the many different design sites around the web.

Keeping that in mind, we ask that all members please follow our simple forum rules and guidelines in order to create an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable.

Also, for those new to the GFWD site, please take a moment and look over our Help and FAQ’s section. Here you will find our most common user questions and answers.

If you don’t find the answer to your questions, feel free to contact us directly. We will continue to update our Help and FAQ’s page as needed.

Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the Get Free Web Designs discussion forum is now officially open for business.

However, before I link it up to the site navigation for everyone to use, I would like to open up a 24-48 hour “invite only” test window to get some content in the forum.

If you’re interested in seeing the forum a day or two before everyone else, comment below and make sure your email address is correct so I can send you the link.

Thank you again to everyone for your continued use and support of Get Free Web Designs. We really appreciate everything you do to help keep our community thriving.

First, yes, the forum is still coming. Basically between Aaron and I over the last couple of months we’ve had some personal and/or business things that needed to come first.

Aaron and I just finished talking and have finalized some of those things, so be looking for the GFWD forum in the next couple of days, most likely over the weekend the forum will be live to the public.

Of course another blog post will follow with the link to the forum and I need to email a couple moderators too and get them up to speed.

Thank you again from both Aaron and I for your continued support and understanding.

While you wait for the forum, why not have a They’re really tasty. Need to know how to make a bakie on the site? Check out my blog post about bakies.

Basically the short answer is we’re doing some testing with a couple moderators to make sure permissions and other functions are working properly for them before we roll it out publicly.

Aaron and I like to do a lot of testing to make sure things are good before rolling them out on the live site. Bugs and issues are not fun to fix in a live environment with tons of traffic.

I still need to reply back to a few people who want to be moderators who sent in messages. I’ll work on that today.

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Get Free Web Designs. Please hang in, it’s coming.

At the moment, the available positions are for forum moderators only. You will not be required to approve or deny design template submissions.

I know a few people are interested in being a moderator on GFWD, but I figured it would be good to post about it again just to make sure who’s in or out.

So what will be required of you being a moderator on GFWD?

For now you will help keep the peace on the forum once it goes public. You’ll also remove spam type posts and/or comments. You’ll also have the ability to block or ban users who violate the forum rules, policies and guidelines.

Speaking of forum rules, policies and guidelines, they are still being ironed out but whoever gets accepted to be a moderator will help shape those rules. I do have some general rules to use as a base, but it would be good to get some moderator feedback on it since you will be part of the team here at Get Free Web Designs.

I’m also thinking it would be good to have moderators in different timezones around the world to help keep things running smooth morning, noon and night.

Ok, so if you are interested in helping out on GFWD by filling moderation positions getting ready to open up, contact us directly with the subject “moderator position”. Be sure to let us know where you are located and any experience you have in forum moderation and why you feel you would be a good moderator for GFWD.

The plan was to launch our forum sometime today (Friday), which is still the plan, however there might be a slight delay, not because the forum isn’t ready, but because I’m in the process of upgrading the server for our hosting to accommodate the expected spike in server load and traffic from having a forum on the site.

Our upstream provider tells me this upgrade should be done within the next 24-72 hours, so sometime between now and over the weekend is what I’ve been told.

So to confirm, the forum is complete and ready to run, we’re just waiting for our server upgrade to be completed before it goes live.

Thank you everyone (designers and users) again for all your continued support of Get Free Web Designs. Bakies for everyone

We are really thankful for all the support the Open Source Web Design community gives GFWD’s. Many designers submit multiple designs which is great, however if you submit them all back to back, you won’t get extended home page exposure.

My advice is to submit one design, wait a few days (2-3), then submit another design and so forth, that way you will get good exposure on the home page as well as the inner design pages over time and not just one big push when you submit designs.

For SEO and better download counts, don’t forget to add tags to your designs when you submit them. Tags like “clean design” or “professional business layout” are just a couple examples to use.

So “what if” you forgot to add tags when you submitted your designs? Don’t worry because you can edit your design submissions from your GFWD dashboard and add the tags.

The above advice will be good for you as a designer and also the OSWD community as a whole. Put it into practice and you will see some amazing results.

Thank you again for your support. Here’s to the next 500 submissions on Get Free Web Designs

Oh how I missed tasty bakies, as I’m sure you did too.

To get the bakie to show up in comments, use : bakie : but remove the spaces before and after the word bakie. I hope that makes sense.

I can’t give you an exact public release date at this time, but it’s safe to say it will be within the next 30 days or less pending no snags or hiccups with the current code work in progress.

Well today I can give you a launch date for the Get Free Web Designs Community Forum to be be live on the site. That date is Friday October 2, 2009.

So why a 2 week delay you might be asking? Well Aaron and I have been wrapping up some client projects for each of our businesses and also fine tuning things around GFWD to accommodate forum moderators and design managers. Also, a 2 week delay all things considered isn’t really too bad IMHO.

Let me just say “Thank you” for your continued patience and support of Get Free Web Designs while we get things ready.

So why the silence around the blog? Basically Aaron and I have been super busy working on various improvements behind the scenes for the site streamlining code, creating some new features, etc. and of course we both run businesses that require us to work on our “day job” paying client projects.

The most major change coming to GFWD’s is the launching of our Community Forum.

* Take a deep breath, yes you read that correctly. A forum is coming soon *

As most people know originally we didn’t want a forum for the site but over the past few months a real need has come to light and for the site to move forward and have even more community support then we already have, the Get Free Web Designs site needs a community forum and it’s going to happen.

The basic framework is already in place for the forum on our development server but before we move it over to the live site we are doing a lot of testing, tweaking, additional programming, and other magical things before we release it for public use.

I can’t give you an exact public release date at this time, but it’s safe to say it will be within the next 30 days or less pending no snags or hiccups with the current code work in progress.

I’ve already sent out a few emails to people who have shown an interest in being moderators, but if you haven’t received an email and are interested in being a GFWD’s Community Forum Moderator, get into contact with me.

Ok, that’s about it for now. Thank you again to everyone who is showing a ton of support for Get Free Web Designs. We appreciate everything you do.

At the moment I won’t mention any specifics of what new features are coming to the GFWD’s website but I will hint that something a lot of our users and Open Source Web Designers want is coming in a few weeks after we do a little more testing.

Currently we’re looking for a few people to help around the site and join our support and moderation team. If you are interested in helping out with user support or various moderation positions getting ready to open up, contact us directly or comment below.

In the coming weeks I will do a more detailed post on all of our upcoming web and application enhancements for Get Free Web Designs, so stay tuned.

We really appreciate everything that the Open Source Design Community does for us, so thank you as always for your continued use and support of GFWD’s.

What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine? We invite you to join us in exploring and innovating across the entire spectrum of performance – from Internet protocols to the browser to website development. Together, let’s make the web faster!

Source: http://code.google.com/speed/

Google has put together some really good videos and an open forum for discussing ways to improve speed around the web, including design elements and open source technologies.

Take a look and lets get some discussion going on here on this blog post. Share your thoughts. Comment below.