Web Design Business- VPS With Reseller Accounts & Transparent Client Support
Jul 29, 2007
I run an established web design business, and currently host my client sites at resellerzoom.com
I offer hosting to my customers and the numbers are growing so I need to upgrade to something more robust, but keep the end-user support (my customers can get support directly from host, and they will attempt to operate without their branding)
Here are my requirements:
End user support
WHM/Cpanel preferrably (or plesk equivelant)
512 - 1GB ram
50 - 100GB monthly transfer
I have been looking at modvps.com as they are owned by Hosting Zoom, which also owns resellerzoom.com
We have about 3 resellers on one server and all of a sudden, when I log in to whm and click "Show Reseller Accounts", all accounts show under root.. What's even strager, is that under package colum, it says "undefined"
However, when I click "list accounts", all accounts show and they are properly setup up with the correct package and owner (not all root.. They also show to which reseller they belong).
how to fix the problem when I click "Show Reseller Accounts"?
I just design websites on the side. I've done about 10 or so and have ended up hosting them on my shared hostgator account as addon domains. I've decided to leave my current "day job" and want to try to pick up a few more web jobs in the interim.
I want to stop putting more websites in my shared account, I don't want to be a reseller and I want to be able to direct people to a host where they would get good customer service for hosting and email issues. I thought it would be nice to establish a relationship with a reseller to whom I could refer my web design clients. Ideally, it would be someone that's local (Twin Cities, MN) and I could meet in person to see if we'd work together well.
Do others do this? Does it seem to make sense to do this?
Another option would be to refer directly to hostgator. I've been happy with them but I haven't needed much in the way of customer service. Do they work well with hosting clients who don't know anything about hosting?
At some point I might want to be a reseller, but right now I want to concentrate on design and learning some new things (CMS is the next thing on my plate).
I just realized I have one additional mouth to feed in the family. So I asked my boss if I could host the company's server at home for extra money for diapers and formula. The answer is "negative". So I asked if I could start a business aside and hosts the server.
The answer is "not SOX compliance" since I am the employee. With that in mind, I am curious how this "reseller" business work. The company that hosts our server charges $500/month for 1/4 rack space, 1mbit bandwidth. We got 2 public ip addresses. One firewall and one for static mapping. Everytime I called them and want to visit the site, they escort me to the data center. Also, they are being escorted to the cage with me by DC staff.
I'm the SA for the company and I manage our infrastructures from desktop/server, phone systems, cluster active/active sql, SAN, etc... I setup VPN, domain controllers, email... I am familiar with LAN corp environment. However, I do not understand how this reseller colocation business works. It seems very "easy" but I am sure no such thing is easy when you run a business and stay in business.
I'm new at this site and see so much information how to start your business plan to details on technical info from other posts. I have two potential former employers who would want to host their servers with me.
With that in mind, I would like to know if you help identify a few things. Basically, I think I need to find a DC that allows me to rent 1/2 or 1 rack. Then maybe a 10 mbit speed to the internet. I dont' know how much this will cost. Then, some equipment that I could shape or limit the bandwidth of each client. I don't want them to use the full 10mbit to the internet. Basically, being able to restrict the 1mbit just like the colocation business that hosts our server. Also, if i could find more customers, then what kind of equipment I need. I talked with Cisco Sales Reps and he recommended a PIX ASA5010.
I'm not planning to do any webhosting. Just host servers and manage and IT consulting. I would like each client has its own public IP address so I could do vpn tunnel for them.
I'm managing our business websites and we're presently using budget shared web hosting.
As the business grows, the uptime of our websites (and web server) is important to the bosses.
I'm wondering whether we should go with managed dedicated web hosting (expensive), VPS hosting (not too familiar with it) or go with a reseller hosting account?
I've officially decided to go with Hostgator but I'm having a hard time choosing which type of plan would make the most sense for; maybe there is something I'm not seeing and I'm hoping to get some additional insight...
Here is my plan; I plan on hosting multiple domains (business and personal) and atleast one e commerce website to start and it will eventually grow into about 5 down the road (this is going to be a drawn out process and I want to do it right).
The problem I have is I realize in order to get a true ecommerce website up in running I will need a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for each site. If I purchase the Business plan it only comes with one dedicated IP and one SSL cert; Hostgator also told me that I'm unable to add an additional dedicated IP address or SSL cert to the business plan so I would have to purchase an additional Business Plan (12.95) per each site. It sounds like I could still host private and not SSL required sites on the business plan and as much domains as I want.
If I go the reseller path then the cost per month will be twice as much as the Business Plan and there is no dedicated IP address included. I will also have to purchase dedicated IP addresses at 2.00 a month and SSL certs as well so that method could get expensive.
I'm also not sure if the baby plan would suffice as well, but apparently not because there is a limit of 1 dedicated IP per plan
What would you guys recommend I do; I want a plan that will allow me to grow with them.
Just curious on what your guys thoughts were..
Also I read a previous post in this forum that someone said their SSL cert prompted the end-user to install the certificate; Being in Ecommerce this is obviously unacceptable to me.
We are co-located at a datacenter and host web sites, and corporate email systems, as well as host dedicated servers for customers.
We currently have two /25 internet facing subnets from our provider. We have a Watchguard X5500e 8 port gigabit firewall that supports routing as well as VLANs. We also currently own QTY4 2848 HP Gigabit switches.
We currently have each switch connected in a loop with 2 gigabit ports trunked using static LCAP. The switches are connected as follows: A > B B > C C > D D > A
Rapid STP is turned on. One thing is - is this the ideal trunking scheme?
The more important question is this. We would like to separate ips from each other using VLANing.
IE: we might have a client with 5 different IPs in one or more subnets and we would like to group them together.
We ideally do not want to break up the subnets into smaller ones as it makes it hard to reconfigure and it wastes ip addresses, as we do not have that many.
If there's a moderator lurking that knows of a better spot for this inquiry, by all means point away.
We're an ad agency in the very vertical market of Recruitment Communications.
We've developed an employment site that we host on our Multi-site account.
They have today requested a quote on what it would take to create 100 email accounts for their various employees and administrators on this employment site.
I initially think we tell them in the proposal that having their employees utilize webmail for their accounts would be least problematic (read: least cost support) for them. It's still going to present a bit of manual labor on our part creating the names, but not too daunting.
The client has no experience on staff that would be able to undertake the task as outlined above, so naturally we're concerned that their needs are indeed met in the best possible way.
One of our company's goals for all of our clients is to, as much as is possible, Under-promise/Over-Deliver. But as we're not specifically a "provider" in the typical sense of what they're asking, I am also thinking that it might be better for both the client and ourselves to examine whether this is a feasible undertaking.
If we were to undertake this 'project', and this is something you've experienced or read about, might you care to offer guidance on what guidelines we should assert/set-up? Web-mail versus Pop? Pricing structure? Support fees? Etceteras, etceteras.
I am trying to transfer someone from Plesk 8.2.1 to cPanel/WHM 11.23. The client that is on Plesk does not seem to have root access because I tried the WHM built in transfer from another server feature and it wasnt working. It said password was incorrect but it was the main password.
So any thoughts on how i can transfer everything safely?
Webhostgiant.com, Asmallorange.com and Dayanahost.com are the companies which can be used for reselling, their plans are resourceful and support is their priority. Pricing is affordable.
I have two reseller accounts with Innohosting and a hacker has got into several sites on both accounts. I have contacted Innohosting and hopefully will get an explanation soon.
But as this is very serious, I want to put it out on this forum also.
At first I thought they must have cracked my FTP access, but they have got into several sites on both reseller accounts so they must have gained access to the server itself, I suspect.
When I login to cpanel as reseller, I see all accounts from drop down menu.
Q1: If I do full backup from reseller's cpanel, will it backup all accounts that I see from drop down menu? Or should I login each account to backup one by one?
Q2: If I can backup all by backing up reseller's cpanel, can I restore all accounts by restoring reseller's cpanel from new server?
i own a smal lVPS and am offering some people reseller hosting. My VPS runs plesk and unfortunately i have only had experience with cpanel. How can i make the users be able to create other accs like a reseller?
"Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client"
I upgraded from MySQL 4 to 5 and everything was fine for about a week. On Monday, I get the error above. From what I've read, this is the oldpassword/new password hash error that I can fix in about 2 minutes on my server. However, this is on a Parcom server, and Parcom has been sloooowww to react.
Can anyone think of another reason why this would be coming up? It's running fine on 3 other PCs that I run as a backup. I've dropped the database twice and rebuilt it twice, still with the same error. Ditto for the user/pass.
Looking for Windows reseller hosting to host a few domains. Need the provider to support the domains in my account. Don't want to take the headache of answering all my friends questions. Space 5-7GB, Transfer 40-60GB with EndUser support. Budget $35-50/month.
I was just wondering if someone has made a new tool/script yet that will allow yo to transfer CPanel accounts in bulk (not the old way of doing them one by one) to another server (VPS/Dedicated) without having root access?
Like I know in order to use the WHM's transfer from server to server you need root access on both servers, but I'm asking, if you have a Reseller account, and a VPS/Dedicated server, I know last time I checked the only way to transfer accounts over was by making a Backup file for each account and then transfering it over which can take a while if you are doing a lot of accounts.
I've been asked to find a way to host our intranet externally without opening up the network.
The webserver accessible to the public domain is within an dmz. The intranet I need to serve is within our internal network.
I've managed to convince our network admin to open port 80 on the server running the intranet but I can't seem to find a way to proxy the content from the intranet server, through the webserver and to the user.
Recently we bough a design from DooptNet here @ WHT - See Original Thread
However, After several weeks of having this new design and numerous amounts of time and editing & making our site look a little more respectable, We got this weird live chat conversation with a gentleman named BEN.
This was around 7am AEST & his first sentence to start off this conversation was:
Quote:
Hi Sean, my name is Ben, and I am giving you 24 hours to remove your web site template that you have stolen otherwise I will public display that you have ripped another members template for personal use without permission of the original owner
Wow that was a bit significant to me as we bought this template from DooptNet here at WHT and the thread is located above. We paid $100 AUD/USD for this and we never stole it as it was said in the starting sentence from Ben.
Ben went on to say that:
Quote:
This topics will be displayed in the largest on-line communities on the internet, these include Web Hosting Talk, Warez-BB, wjunction and so forth.
For real right?
Ben also went on further to say that many other people have fallen for this and this is all part of a Con. I am not sure if Ben is telling the truth, But I would like some word from Sean @ DooptNet and this Ben Person.
No E-mail Address was left but - Admin@webhostingtalk.com in the Live Chat.
I asked Ben where we have ripped this site from as I would like to see it, After this Ben left the chat but before hand demanded that I remove the Stolen Content within 24hrs.
Not sure what to do from here, I have contacted Sean here at WHT and are still awaiting a response.
I'm designing a network that should be able to support both dedicated servers and also offer colocation (full rack and half rack). Things will be relatively small at start but the design must be able to scale. The colo area will be secured from the dedicated server area.
Right now, this is what I'm thinking:
CORE/DISTRIBUTION combined: - Two cisco 6509's running HSRP - Each 6509 is connected to the same two upstream ISP's via BGP (so that means 4 links in total) - Each 6509 is connected to the access switches (described below) - The 6509's will have a single gigabit crossconnect between them so that they can talk to each other for HSRP, iBGP, etc.
ACCESS - Each of our racks will have an L3 switch at the top of the rack for all the servers in the rack to plug into - there will be ~30 servers per rack - these switches will use 4 x 1 gbit ports for trunking to the core. They will be configured in two 802.3ad link aggregation groups (ie 2 x 1gbit links per LAG group). One LAG group will connect to the first 6509, the second LAG group will connect to the second 6509. - The default gateway on these L3 switches will be configured with the HSRP virtual IP address of the 6509's. -spanning tree will have to be enabled to avoid loops since the two 6509's are connected directly also
QUESTIONS: 1) Each dedicated server will get 5 usable IP addresses, so I'd have to subnet my IP address space accordingly (into a bunch of /29's). This also means that I'd have to setup 1 VLAN per subnet (wich means 1 VLAN per server!). Is this a scalable design? If I have 1000 servers I'd need 1000 VLAN's! Isn't there a limit to the number of VLANS that can be created/handled by my core switches? How do larger providers do it that have thousands of servers?
2) Is this design scalable/redundant? The only single point of failure that I see is my access switch (if it dies, it could take out a rack's worth of servers). I guess I would have to live with this and would have spares on hand.
3) I'm a little confused with the interaction of BGP and HSRP. What happens, for example, if one of the links to one of the ISP's goes down on the active HSRP router? I dont want it to fail over to the inactive HSRP router, because the router is still good, its just a link that went down. Would the active HSRP router be smart enough to realize (maybe via iBGP) that the inactive HSRP router can still route to that ISP and thus just ROUTE the traffic to that inactive 6509 and then have that router send it out to the ISP? I'm assuming this traffic would travel across the 1gbit xconnect between the two 6509's so I may have to consider increasing that capacity using link aggregation aswell?
4) Which cisco switch would be good as my L3 access switch? It would have to support ~30 servers in the rack plus have at least 4x1gbit ports that I can config into two lag groups to uplink to the core.
To this point (i hope the ascii diagram is understandable, i did my best on ASCII art), there are no problems. The problem comes when pluging in L2 switches. I would like them to be pluged to both L3 switches, but i don't see how to do this without HSRP or VRRP. The thing is L3 switches will also do VLAN's for the network, so HSRP would mean using 3 IP's for every VLAN and a terrible configuration mess.
I am not seeing the way to do this setup and attach a L2 switch to both L3 switches without using HSRP.
I just want redundancy for the case where one of the routers or L3 switches could fail.
If you're browsing for a new host, do you care about the design of the site you're looking at? Would you be put off a host if their site was poorly designed and ugly?
