Non-Control Panel Grouping

[puleen]

I was talking to one of the Vortech Technical Support Reps, and it was brought to my attention that with some plans there are only 25 billable accounts ( meaning that 25 accounts with control panel acess ). This means that if I have a cluster of clients that dont need control panel access, it would make sense for me to group them under one account and administer their accounts accordingly. Is there anyone who has done this, and if there are any tutorials or guides that would show me how I would go about administering these accounts.

[Brian]

If you do this, that means that any domain configuration / mail configuration (or any work done in the CP) support required must be done by you (or an individual who is designated to manage these settings for everyone).

Also, I would only recommend this sort of configuration for a UNIX hosting. You will need to give these users FTP access to their files, and you only get 1 account for Windows plans. Under UNIX, you can create several sub-accounts, and set the directory permissions accordingly.

Plan it carefully though, because it could become cumbersome to manage, depending on how many domains you plan on handling under a single account.

You won't be able to effectively bill for disk usage because your account is billed for the summary of all disk usage (mail, db, web, etc). You will not have an easy way of tracking this for each customer. For the same reason, you will have a difficult time of tracking bandwidth for each customer.

There is a potential for losing $ here... but if you plan on doing this for customers with small sites and low hits, then you may be ok.

So you should ask yourself if this administrative overhead is worth the $4 per acct. you'd be saving.

[puleen]

Thanks for bringing this up now, something I didnt know about. I am going to try moving my personal dummy domains over and playing around with this and see how it works out. I do not care abotu the $4 that I would save, but it logically made sense to me to group accounts that do not require control panel access. But as you say, it would be hard to setup the permissions for windows accounts (which most of my clients are), then I will leave it the way it is and not take up more stress then I need.

Thanks

[Brangwyn]

I think you'll find a good few of us do this or similar things, I use a single account for adding databases to some customers so they're all grouped under a single plan and the customers couldn't go adding or changing their space allocations without me knowing ... partly becuase of the previous limits on diskspace which don't really apply now that we're all on summary usage.

[mresell]

Ditto I do this as well. So do several other people, at least. I have my service domain on unix and in general think it works better for this. There are several cases where customers may want you doing things for them anyway, but unix seems to give more flexibility with hsphere.

[Two Roads Media]

I play in a couple of bands and host both of their sites under one account. Because the sites are small and share certain characteristics, it is just easier. I doubt I would group clients together even though most of mine don't use the CP, but I could definitely see doing it with personal sites or with development/testing sites.