Help Desk Resources

Hosting

Quality hosting with superior uptime at a reasonable price is very important. After looking at dozens of website hosts over the past 7+ years, I’ve narrowed the choice down to two hosts that I use consistently.

What I look for is:

• Easy to use control panel (CPanel)
• Unlimited email accounts and databases
• PHP
• Excellent uptime
• Great customer support

Here’s the one that I recommend and that you see me use in the video tutorials for the home study course:

Gator

I primarily recommend this one because they have a phone number for customer service, whereas the other one only replies to email and support tickets.

Help Desk Software

There are dozens of affiliate software programs available for you to purchase and upload to your website. I’ve looked at most of them, tried out half a dozen, and I’ve narrowed it down to one software system that stands out from the pack.

Here’s what I look for:

• No username or password required
• Knowledge base
• Email piping
• Runs on PHP and MySQL

The software that I use, and that you see me install in the video tutorials is found here:

Trellis Help Desk

FileZilla is free, and very popular. When you set up your hosting, you will get login instructions and information on uploading files to your website. FileZilla needs three things: address, username, password.

The address is usually just “yoursite.com” (your actual website address) or “ftp.yoursite.com” and the username and password is provided by your hosting company.

Zip / Unzip

Windows has a free unzip utility. But I can also recommend IZArc, 7Zip, PowerArchiver and CuteZip.