I have a client that I would call my 'primary' client, and as such he gets some leeway with me. Sunday he called and wants some new business venture of theirs to have a preliminary site up by Thursday so they can sell the idea to their initial prospects.
All fine & dandy. Now the present issue is that this morning he decided that it's time to get a new/different webhost for this venture. A bit of background...
Now this client has close to a dozen websites spread out over various hosting facilities that he's randomly found over the years. Ie, he's the sort that will pick the first or 2nd google result and call to give credit card details and let whoever is doing his IT at the time sort it out from there. So at this point he's got close to a dozen different sites (mostly focused around 4-5 business that revolve around their 'core' business) spread out all over, and it's a pain to administrate when issues arise.
Needless to say the randomness with which he does his IT decisions (he doesn't understand that web hosting isn't the same as buying off the shelf software for MS os's) is part of the reason for the randomess of the results he's gotten. I've slowly taken over more & more of the out-of-office IT related activities for their companies as a result, and have at least kept things stable the last year or so.
So for this new venture they're doing, I also want to get hosting I can eventually move all of his sites to (over the next couple of months). I think what I want for him is something equivalent to a reseller account somewhere that offers good support and acceptable uptime, because none of his sites generate incredible traffic counts or bandwidth counts, but it sure would be nice to have them consolidated into a single location that I can administrate them from. Most of the smaller sites can be moved as easily as ftp'ing things into place, doing a bit of quick database work and then moving dns, but one or two sites have enough traffic and custom rolled php so that will take a bit longer.
So the difficulty comes because I need to find something by this evening, get it up & running with a domain currently registered (dns) at godaddy, and have it be something I can migrate the rest of his sites to over the next 2-3 months. I do *not* have an LLC for my personal business so I don't want to resell hosting to him (I'm assuming that the liability isn't worth it for my dba status) but I do want to find something we can have dozens (maybe 50 eventually?) of sites hosted under. Typically I see this advertised by hosting companies as reseller accounts.
And I'm relying on info gathered here to supplant my decision making, as I did my last round of looking into hosts several months back and garnered a short list that I can't post here because of my new account status. So I'll just name them:
wiredtree
rackspace
slicehost
joyent
(these next 3 I have reseller hosting specifics from)
mosso
a2hosting
mediatemple
bravenet
dreamhost
More or less in the order that I perceived them to be at the time. Mosso is one of the ones that specifically lists reseller hosting, but I'm reading mixed things about them here and elsewhere on the net. Wiredtree looks interesting, but I'm not trying to move his sites to a single facility with independant plans per site,
I'm building a kind of a file sharing site also with video conversions ( convert a full DVD to flash and stream) and if i can find more ideas, even more features. It won't be free (i'm not sure which way to go though, subscription-based or pay per bandwidth + storage) and it will support download managers. I'm not sure which way to go : Joyent or dedicated servers with RAIDs. If i distribute files over servers, and a users wants the files to be converted to flv etc., it will increase the server load, ( and if i put a lot of users in 1 server it will increase the load even more) so it won't be very good.
So i thought SAN for this, but couldn't find any hosts serving it ( especially for a reasonable price ). Joyent is close enough (Amazon S3 is very very expensive), but although bandwidth and storage prices seem good, server power is low ( and very expensive if higher ) Which way should i go?
For reliable managed hosting, with some research, I can find...
Liquid Web Rackspace
It seems like Liquid Web is definitely the bang for the bucks.. but it also makes me think if it's too good to be true. I feel Rackspace is more "professional" and they're more "high-end". But I definitely love the pricing from LiquidWeb. for the same price, I can get a quad core + 4GB from LiquidWeb, and maybe an AMD dual-core + 1GB from Rackspace..
My question is : Do LiquidWeb and Rackspace offer the same kind of "managed services"? Rackspace told me that they would give me an account manager which makes me feel more personalized. but I also had a live chat with LiquidWeb and the sales kept marketing the "Heroic support"
This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?
Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.
So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:
1. Who will be managing these sites?
2. How important is site security between sites?
3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.
1. Who will be managing these site?
If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.
When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.
2. How important is site security between sites?
This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.
If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.
Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.
The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.
3. Will these domains need SSLs?
As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.
Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.
Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?
It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.
If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.
But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.
If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.
The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is my dilemma, thanks to a thread in these forums I was directed to a hosting website called pc-core.net and I was interested in using them, because it does not appear that they oversell at all. My question is regarding the fact that they have the shared hosting for $12/month with ~5gb of disk space and 50gb of transfer. I then just looked at reseller hosting for the heck of it, and noticed i could get a reseller hosting account with 45gb storage and 450gb of bandwidth for $10/month. Even though I wont be selling hosting, or anything like that, can I use a reseller hosting account like a normal shared hosting account?...just with more space and bandwidth?
I need a VPS server for a gaming server that requires an uber/good upload connection speed. Packet transfer speeds range from 4 Kbps to 40+ Kbps for each player and I have about 300 players on the server at any given time. RAM/Processor isn't that important just ~1 GB of RAM would be sufficient. I heard good reviews about slicehost and ubiquityservers and I'm having a tough decision on who to choose for my gaming server.
U's Infinity VPS and Slicehost's 1GB slice plan are the same price.
I am wondering what the difference between Linode and Slicehost is they both seem pretty solid (However linode's real monthly billing is more appealing.)
Also when someone has a VPS (the cheapest (256mb ram...)) Do you find it easy to run your own Sql server and Memcached while running a webserver?
My service at Slicehost recently got very slow so I don't think their network management is the best it could be. So I'm preparing to leave if it remains like this for anymore than a few days. Is there any VPS people could recommend with comparable service catered to developers with an active community and good connection speeds?
I have been using DreamHost for several years and for the most part it has been a good experience. The price is cheap, you can host an unlimited number of sites, and I have not experienced much downtime.
But now that I am hosting a lot of sites based on WordPress, server performance has become an issue. It can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds for a site to appear in a browser. In comparison, the static HTML sites that I crank out in Dreamweaver pop up almost instantly.
I have done some research on companies offering virtual web servers and it appears that a lot of people like SliceHost. I am aware that I will now have to administer my own web server and no longer have the benefit of using c-panel. This doesn't scare me as I have been playing around with Linux and Apache since RedHat 4.0 and now use Ubuntu at work.
Before I sign up for a $20/monthly account at SliceHost, I am wondering if I will notice a significant performance difference between them and DreamHost? Has anyone on this forum ever made this switch and if so, did they think it was worth it?
Right now, I have about 25 domains on my DreamHost account that I will be moving over. About 12 of them are WordPress and I plan to eventually convert the remaining static sites over to either WordPress or Joomla. I also have about 12 sites on BlueHost that I would like to eventually transfer to the virtual hosting plan as well. So I will eventually be hosting about 40 sites. (As a side note, it seems that BlueHost's servers have a slight performance edge over DreamHost. But it doesn't seem to be that great.)
Obviously, the ultimate solution would be to get my own server at a co-location place like RackSpace, but right now, I don't want to spend the additional $$$ and want to become a better website admin before I make this jump.
I have a Magentocommerce shoping cart presently hosted on a dedicated server (2.40GHz , 28 KB Cache celeron processor - 512 MB RAM) and the processor is running on full steam when customer accesses certain pages. This is because the shopping cart is processor intensive. I see that my MYSQL hogs the processor and am looking to VPS to provide me with more power for less cost.
I have slicehost and Linode on my list of VPS providers.
1.Linode offer only RAID-1 against Slichost's RAID-10. Does this matter that much? How do I decide on this?
2. From what I see, on VPS, a 256 MB plan would mean around 40 sites sharing the quad core processor which means, I would get worst case, 250MHz guaranteed from VPS provider. Will this still be better than my present celeron processor. I am unable to compare them.
3. I would like to hire someone reliable to get the VPS server installed with basic LAMP setup and extensions required for Magento. Will someone be able to help me on this? Where do I look for such a service?
A friend and I both recently purchased VPS "slices" for various reasons. I joined linode.com and he joined slicehost, agreeing that we'd share opinions and experiences with each other to see which one was the better deal.
Up front, slicehost gives a better first impression - but that's subjective - so we were at first both inclined to buy from them. That's when we learned about linode through WHT.
We both got a low-end slice - he got the 256MB slice from slicehost, I got the 360MB slice from linode.
After about 2 months of service with both companies, I can definitely say that they've lived up to both their reputations. We haven't experienced any downtimes from either of them, performance has never felt sluggish (although the extra ram from linode certainly helps!), and support has been quick to respond from both companies.
I think the thing about our particular situation, though, is that we're both very familiar with linux systems, so apart from the initial set up phase where we wanted to make sure we got the right distro (CentOS 5 users here), we haven't heavily used either administrative web apps. Most of our access after day 1 has been ssh to our machines to install various components, mostly ruby, rails, mysql, rubygems, apache, and the rest of the web app stack.
For our situation, both these companies met expectations, and I give them a thumbs up to potential customers that are on the fence for whatever reason. That said, I'm giving the slight edge to linode, because you're getting basically the same service but with more RAM at the same price.
I've had a VPS for about 4 years now, and overall have been happy with it. I have about 25 domains now, with moderate traffic to most of them. I'm getting close to the capacity of the VPS, and need to expand.
I'm thinking my next account will be a reseller account. The reason is that I don't want to have anything to do with managing the hosting. I view the reseller account as being a more hands-off hosting approach. Am I right in assuming this?
Capacity and cost of the various plans seem close enough to not be a factor for me.
Would I lose anything in going to reseller hosting? Most of my domains are pretty simple WordPress blogs or html sites.
I'm assuming that with reseller hosting, things like updating cpanel, php, mySQL, etc. are done by the hosting comapany and completely transparent to me.
I've been researching for a few weeks now trying to decide if I should go ahead and purchase vps hosting, and I tried out a few services and so far I'm really not seeing the advantage. a lot of these hosts only offer you about 256-384 mb of ram! how are you supposed to run a web server with so little ram? I installed one site on one vps i was trying out and it crashed immediately with "out of memory" exceptions...
this same site runs ok on reseller, a bit slow yes (which is why i wanted to move to vps) but I never got a memory error. not to mention that if you're running the web server AND the db server that's going to destroy your 384 mb of ram even 512 doesn't seem like enough...
now I'm not trying to bitch I'm trying to understand, maybe vps isn't what i'm looking for. can someone explain what the advantage is if I'm getting so little resources compared to reseller hosting?
I have been doing sites for poeple who up to now have already registered thier domain names themselves. I have seen lots of adverts offering reseller accounts but I don't understand how it all works I realise this sounds stupid but could someone explain the process to me please.
I currently have a reseller account that is clustered, but it still fails. Is there more troubles on a reseller server because of the other reseller accounts with resource hog customers? Will a VPS solve this issue? I need something a little more stable. I host some political websites and ecommerce stores that we want to keep their sites up as much as possible.
And yes I do know VPS servers go down to. I am just curious if they are more reliable.
I'm considering the advantage of using some of my hosting space/accounts to offer an affordable reseller package. (Yes, I do have permission to do this)
Anybody got advice/tips on how you've/would set this up?
I am stuck between GoDaddy and HostGator for reseller account. What I want is to offer my client to host their site I design on my hosting service but I also want to offer reseller program on other site.
Here are the problems:
GoDaddy have good automatic system, but it won't let me have the freedom to have access into my client's cpanel to upload or update their website unless they have to give me their username and password. GoDaddy requires me to purchase reseller and SUPER reseller package if I want to run two websites.
GatorHost offers me to manage WHM and Cpanel for my clients which is good. They also have ENOM for me to be domain dealer. The negative thing about Gatorhost is that I have to use one of their free template, if I need one, but their templates sucks! And I do not know how to tailor my own website with their WHM automated billing system.
What do you suggest and where can I find a good hosting template to edit. I just wish that GatorHost have automatic system with better template!
I'm thinking about diving into the world of web host reselling to host my clients web sites and help produce some residual income for myself
I have been comparing companies and their reselling plans for weeks now and am looking for some professional advice.
After searching through the forum I find a lot of designers and developers recommending hostgator
I like the looks of the plans offered by Green Geeks, you can find a rundown of their packages here: greenresellerwebhosting dot com
I like the unlimited disk space and bandwidth offered with every package and of course the green factor... however they do limit the number of domains you can host with each package.
I can't help to wonder if the unlimited diskspace and bandwidth is even necessary with the limited hosted domains and of course tech support for my clients is of vital importance
I have a few projects of making websites for some clients. I want to buy some hosting space, should i buy shared or resellers accounts? When they say one can host unlimited domains on a shared hosting space does it mean one can also use it for different clients. As of now i am not interested in just selling domain names and hosting spaces to clients. I need space only to host the website i design for my clients.
I would like to sign up for utropicmedia.net's reseller web hosting . But at the same time I have found an interesting thing on their web site. They offer web hosting in 3 regions: Europe, Asia and USA. What do you think is it worth to ask them about possibility to have some of sites hosted in Europe some in Asia and some in USA with one account.
why reseller accounts are considered better than shared hosting accounts?
Both are the same, except that reseller manages each domain separately. Shared hosting is way much cheaper than a reseller, are there really big negatives which make them much cheaper?
If SEO and Adsense wise, there is a difference between shared and reseller, due to separate domain management in the reseller being favourable for SEO, I would go with reseller.
So far, I've done shared hosting, and using htaccess, had no problems setting up multiple sites in my shared account, which is a lot cheaper than any reseller account. Not sure how the search engines would treat my multiple sites....
Are addon domains (in a shared hosting) - bad, since Cpanel actually treats them as subdomains?
to start a web design and hosting business and am in need of some hosting for it all...
I've looked at the reseller hosting at [url] which looks good, but they said that I cannot host a 'file distribution' web site. Because one of the sites I will be hosting is an eCommerce application that sells videos for download, I'm not sure whether this would be allowed. I read the SLA and I think it would be, as long as the bandwidth didn't exceed 25GB per month.
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of other web hosting packages that might be suitable for everything I need (PHP4, PHP5, MySQL) that weren't too expensive. I don't really want to pay more than £40 per month.
Ideally I'd like unlimited bandwidth and data transfer and web space, but if not, at least enough for a good number of sites!
