Reseller Hosting Accounts

[Magic3rds]

Has anyone looked into Reseller Hosting?

I was talking to a mate at work who knows someone that's bought a reseller account and is making a bit of cash from it. It got me thinking about if it's a good idea. I could look at it to offer to photographers who are looking to showcase their own work away from the likes of Flickr, SmugMug etc

I looked at www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk but wary as to how can offer unlimited Space & Bandwith all the time...

Has anyone looked into this also?

Jez

 

[neil_g]

unlimited is very rarely (if at all) unlimited. there will be clauses in the small print regarding fair usage and cancellation of accounts. also your site could fall foul to other users on the same server pushing their bandwidth.

 

[gramps]

Also if you host for others you will have to be prepared for when things go wrong, it may be down to you to resolve it ... Could you?

 

[srichards]

Try heart internet. They have a reasonable reseller account. But if you resell to lots of people you are going to have to be around to cope with downtime.

Unlimited can be offered but careful use of network connection would limit the actual amount of transfer any particular domain could use so they can offer it but you'd never get anywhere near it.

Other alternative is to get a vps or cloud server and resell space on that as most of the control panels can let you do that. This way you control how many people are on your bit a bit more than if you are on shared space, it would be up to the host to arrange your clients.

You'll also need liability insurance and reselling web space is something considered high risk and expensive to insure for as the disaster potential is high. I looked into it with doing web design and realised it wasn't worth it due to the liability issues. If you have a client that sues for loss of earnings while their site is down it adds up quite quickly.

 

[arad85]

I've just signed up with unlimited. Not as a reseller, but as a personal user. Support seems good (less than 2 mins at 8pm last night).

 

[arad85]

there will be clauses in the small print regarding fair usage and cancellation of accounts.

I couldn't find it in the Ts and Cs for unlimitedwebhosting

 

[neil_g]

I couldn't find it in the Ts and Cs for unlimitedwebhosting

oh there'll be a clause somewhere. bandwidth and server time isnt cheap..

 

[arad85]

oh there'll be a clause somewhere. bandwidth and server time isnt cheap..

I guess you could claim this is the get out clause:

Engaging in any activity that, at Unlimited Web Hosting UK Ltd's absolute discretion, disrupts, interferes or is harmful to our services, business, operations, reputation, customers or ability of our customers to use our service is prohibited.

Seems fair enough to me. But then I don't run (or intend to run) a service that utilises much CPU/many Gbytes of bandwidth per day. It's relatively cheap (£3.30 inc vat per month) and I can host as many domains as I like at no extra cost.

Clearly, they wouldn't provide the bandwidth/CPU required for google to run for £3.30 a month, but for us mere mortals, it seems like a good deal. Anyway, my domains are registered with 123, so if I did have any real problems, I could find another service and point the DNS at that instead and just stop paying the £3.30....

There's also this:

1.4 Unauthorised Scripts and Executables
The customer agrees not to run any scripts, executables, or other programs or processes on Unlimited Web Hosting UK Ltd's servers that will any any way adversely affect the performance of said servers.

but I'd expect that on any hosting package - if I ran a process that slowed the webserver, I'd expect to get knobbled for it.

If I were contemplating a reseller account, I'd be quizzing them about what other resellers typically did/bandwidth etc...

 

[Magic3rds]

As you say arad85 I thinks it's best to give them a call before I decide on anything further. I hadn't thought about any sorts of insurance, mainly because I didn't think about looking for customers with major websites. My thought was to just look at mr everyday user looking to have a website on line

 

[ptholt]

I have been involved in this side of the industry for many years and there is always a get out clause even on the unlimiteds under the AUP (acceptable use policy) and when the parent company starts getting compromised or the bandwidth being used starts to impact other paying customers, you will be dragged off the server kicking and screaming aup hehehe

 

[KIPAX]

I have been involved in this side of the industry for many years

Same here (cyberstrider ltd) and 100% agree

As for the OPs original question.. Reselling can earn you some money yes.. But the worse people to sell accounts to is bandwidth hungry photographers... OK a few local business and mates and family ..all who just need a website... But trying to offer a service like flickr etc isnt viable with reseller accounts.

 

[wibbly]

I'm not sure how 'unlimited' www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk's plans are, I pay £3.00 a month and have never had an issue. I believe they offer a more expensive option if you need dedicated VPS and dedicated servers which would cover much greater requirements but not sure if these are for reseller accounts or completely unlimited. However, I will vouch for their customer service.

I've been with them for almost 2 years now, and they are excellent. I've had two negligble outtages in that time - we may on occasion have slow time but that is the price you pay on a cloud service.

If you have an issue and speak or email them, the response time is fantastic as someone pointed out, within a couple of minutes they are back to you.

I'm genuinely stunned at how they offer the service they do for the price they do.

 

[Super Simple]

Unless you plan on selling to an existing client base, I wouldn't bother with it. The competition is simply too fierce and you'll get eaten alive unless you have more money than God to pour into the venture.

It's a good thing to supplement your income with an added service for clients, but not a good business to get into unless you have a truckload of expertise in the area and a very innovative approach.

What might be good to look into is seeing if you can combine a reseller package with Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. You could then offer clients packages with unlimited storage space with the caveat that they would need to purchase the storage space and bandwidth that they use, which is reasonable.

They could also use the unlimited storage for backing up photos as well.

Now, there are security implications as you'd only need the URL to access the files, but that's solved by password protecting ZIP or RAR files.