Reseller Questions

[Unregistered]

In regards to reseller accounts:

Am I reselling your Budget, Advanced and/or Professional shared hosting plans? Or am I reselling my resources from my resellers account, ie ... bw, diskspace, etc.?

If the later, reselling my recources, how much do additional ip addresses cost, along with set up fees etc. And also if there are any limitations to the number of ip addresses that are permitted.

Thanks in advance for your quick response,
Scott

[Matt]

Hi Scott,

Resellers are on servers equivalent to "Professional" level. Eventually we will have various levels of reseller accounts to match the three grades of shared hosting. The three grades of shared hosting are a new feature that we have available, and eventually we plan on offering similar grades of reseller account.

But for the time being everyone enjoys the professional grade, which is the only grade we offered since we opened the doors 4 years ago.

You are not actually reselling our plans, it would be 100% private label, so you are in essence creating your own package specs, pricing, features, etc. You have access to everything like Fantastico, addon scripts, email limits, disk space limits, transfer limits, etc. You decide how much you want to give on a particular plan.

For example, if you want your "Bronze" package to not have Fantastico and only have the ability to create 10 email accounts, you can do that. Then with your "Gold" package (or whatever you want to call it) you can give Fantastico and unlimited emails.

Its all up to you.

As for IPs, you get 2 to start with. Those go towards your private DNS (ns1.yourbrand.com / ns2.yourbrand.com) and one of those IPs becomes your main shared IP, and the other can be used if needed for a dedicated IP for a site.

There are no setup fees, or "per domain" fees. It is a flat monthly rate that we charge you. Then you bill your customers and keep the profit.

No, there is no limit to IP addresses, though we need a little advance time if you want a large allocation to get them provisioned from the datacenter. There really isn't much need for them for most people. Most of our resellers only use the 2 for their nameservers (if they even want private DNS) and most rarely request dedicated IPs for sites. The usual reason for a dedicated IP address for a site is so that an SSL certificate can be provisioned for that particular site.

In a nutshell you can use the main shared IP for all of your sites without issue. If you need more IPs, we can supply them without a problem. They are $2.00/mo/per IP. Buts its perfectly fine to use the shared IP all of your sites.

I think I covered all the questions. If you have more, or I missed anything, feel free to post a reply.

[Unregistered]

First, that was quick and I appreciate it. What are you doing working at that hour on a Saturday night? Shouldn't you be enjoying a couple of Coors or something?

Ok. So I will be reselling the resources that have been allocated to me as dictated by your reseller plans, correct?

I just need to be absolutely sure I understand this part because if I am reselling the bw, diskspace, etc that you have alloted me, then I need to ensure I have enough resources available to parse up accordingly.

Lastly, slightly off topic and potentially beyond the scope of this post, about the ip addresses. When one is attempting to build partnerships (reciprocal links) from one website to another, it has been my understanding that said links from the same ip address are not weighted as much (or even disgarded) towards "link popularity" as those from different ip addresses. My knowledge is a little dated in this area and maybe the search engine algorithms don't discount links from the same ip address as much anymore, with the popularity of shared hosting these days. Either way, as I stated this may be "beyond the scope" but if you have any insight, I would greatly appreciate it and if not, I completely understand.

Thank you,
Scott

[Matt]

Hi Scott-

First, that was quick and I appreciate it. What are you doing working at that hour on a Saturday night? Shouldn't you be enjoying a couple of Coors or something?

I wish!

Ok. So I will be reselling the resources that have been allocated to me as dictated by your reseller plans, correct?

Basically there are no automated resource limits or caps in the reseller and pro plans. The limits are disk and transfer. Pro plans are monitored by humans and sites that use excessive resources like cpu or whatever are dealt with on a case by case basis vs the resource limited plans where the server scripts just disable a site that is going bananas.

.

Lastly, slightly off topic and potentially beyond the scope of this post, about the ip addresses. When one is attempting to build partnerships (reciprocal links) from one website to another, it has been my understanding that said links from the same ip address are not weighted as much (or even discarded) towards "link popularity" as those from different ip addresses. My knowledge is a little dated in this area and maybe the search engine algorithms don't discount links from the same ip address as much anymore, with the popularity of shared hosting these days. Either way, as I stated this may be "beyond the scope" but if you have any insight, I would greatly appreciate it and if not, I completely understand.

I too am not an SEO expert but I do try to keep semi-current and what I have found is that there are arguments on both sides of if shared IPs matter. I believe the final word on it from google was no, shared IPs have no impact on PR etc and I would tend to believe that statement. But again I am not an expert in this field and the best place to ask would be google themselves. I believe I have seen an article in the faq referenced several times regarding IP based penalties.

[andychev]

As far as i know from all the latest seo papers ive read you have nothing to worry about when it comes to shared ips. Anything that the search engines cant determine as 100% true they dont use in their algorythms. Ie they cant determine that two sites from the same ip are indeed owned by the same company so cant use that as a reliable ranking factor.

TBH if you created 100 sites on the same server all linked to each other they are not going to generate a high page rank as non of those sites will be linked to from a high rank website. This is the main factor when it comes to links. But again i wouldnt worry too much at all about getting links to your site in the short term as from experience they produce very little in the way of direct traffic and contribute very little to page rank unless you can get on a link put on a bg site, like amazon etc.

To get good listings on google you need to concentrate on keyword density as this is one of main factors when it comes to google then work from there. When i say keyword density dont just think you need to put a keyword 5 or even ten times, think 50+ Also look into site ghosting, naughty!, frowned upon like mad and is a bit of a cheat but im not currently aware of the search engines being able to automatically pick up on this so it is a good way to get high ranking quickly but i wouldnt recommend it in the long run, i belive ford got blacklisted a few months back for doing it?! its basically script the recognises search engines and keeps them on a keyword rich page but redirects humans to the correct homepage.

Also if you are selling something look into google adwords it is a very inexpensive way of promoting a site and gives great returns. However, there are wrong and right ways to do adwords and i would advise reading technical articles on it for a couple of weeks before even starting as it is easy to get wrong. Big companies tend to employ 'google adwords people' with the sole job of managing their google adwards. So be warned it isnt as easy as it first looks!

Hope all this helps in some way.