Reselling Reseller plans

[watermelon]

Has anyone out there been successfully providing hosting to folks who want to resell it themselves? If so, how do you deal with billing, resource allocation (such as disk quota/ bandwidth), etc.? Do you provide these things for your reseller clients in some way outside of HSphere?
I guess that another option is to simply resell an entire (e.g. Cypher)

Paul

[admin]

Right now H-SPhere does not support this, but it is in the works to allow resellers to creat reseller plans.

[esites]

I have a guy who is reselling as a developer. Basically, I setup a plan called "Business Developer" and give him nothing more than a chunk of resources for a certain price. That plan can have as many sites as he wants, but he cannot take advantage of automated billing, auto account setup, etc...

That is his problem, my agreement with him is very straight forward. I also support him, not his customers.

If you think you can make money reselling to resellers with all the cut throat companies out there, I think you are kidding yourself. Unless you have credible resources and support like Vortech it just won't happen. Even when H-Sphere add that as an option, I would be skeptical to enable it since it is not going to be cost effective to support that model.

Try doing it the way I did it. On a small scale it works fine, but as a general rule it's not practical.

My opinion of course, but isn't that why we call this a forum?

Good luck!

[bocosoft]

We have lots of small resellers (2-10 sites). Either we set them up as esites suggested or we manually setup new accounts for them... but that is probably not what you are looking for :wink2:

[Vixen]

bocosoft, are you saying that you are setting up your own resellers (i.e. they can host their own customers) under your account??

[watermelon]

Originally Posted by bocosoft

We have lots of small resellers (2-10 sites). Either we set them up as esites suggested or we manually setup new accounts for them... but that is probably not what you are looking for :wink2:

bocosoft - I think that sounds about like what the inquiries we're getting are like. What is esites? Do you have any reseller clients on Windows machines?

Thanks,
Paul

[Vixen]

Ummmmmmmmmmm fellas, I don't think having your own resellers is something that is allowed.

[esites]

I think what watermelon is looking for is what H-Sphere is planning on allowing. What I do and what most people do when we say we sell to resellers is more like set a website designer/developer up with a chunk of resources where he/she can charge their customers not only for design but the hosting as well. Why not... if they can get a deal that they are happy with for a decent price, then that sounds like what is allowed. Basically, it is no different than selling a larger plan to a company who may host 7-10 of their own sites.

[Vixen]

IMO, hosting 7-10 of their own sites is a bit different than a reseller having their own resellers.

[Brangwyn]

I don't think having your own resellers is something that is allowed.

It's been allowed becuase basically theres no way to really stop it from going on, whats it's not, is supported. We had the discussion a year or two back and thats how I recall the outcome anyway.

Personally I'd prefer not to see any features to allow resellers to have resellers .. if you think about it for a few minutes it has the potential to cause major headaches very quick becuase of the exponential growth it may cause. Just think what crap we'd be in if email volumes suddenly grew by 20-30% in just a matter of a week or two.

[Light Speed]

Originally Posted by Brangwyn

Just think what crap we'd be in if email volumes suddenly grew by 20-30% in just a matter of a week or two.

You mean 200-300%

Also think of the headaches regarding spammers signing up for accounts.

The more links in the chain from server to end user the higher the chances are for not being able to stop problems before they get out of hand.

[esites]

I just can't figure out why anyone would want the support headaches of:

"Ok, let me make a call to my guy who will check with his guy, who will check with support... we will get back to you in, oh, let's say THREE DAYS!!!"

It's hard enough for us on the first level to get answers sometimes, can you imagine how naked you would feel 2 or 3 levels down?

[mresell]

Yeah not a big fan of reselling too far down myself. I think affiliates and partner and marketing deals work better for this. Partly, because some resellers don't really have what it takes to resell or support their customers and I don't want that headache. The ones that do... well they will probably want to deal with vt.

[watermelon]

Just to clarify - I'm not interested in creating a reseller empire a la Vortech. I just have customers (web developers) who want to be able to sell hosting to their clients and profit from it, not just send those clients to me.

[Brangwyn]

Then simply create a "Developer Plan" give them a ton of disk and traffic and charge them per domain they add to the control panel. Their customers won't get their own control panel (or FTP if on windows) but in most instances this isn't a big problem