Reseller Questions

[Matt]

Hi Andrew,

There are lots of customers who do not shop on price alone. The other thing to consider is that unlimited, is not really unlimited, and many people who have been hosting for a long time know this. Take a look at Terms of Service if you want to see an example of what most hosts restrict on their unlimited plans.

From a host's standpoint, in order to get yourself into the unlimited game, you need to have a dedicated server or possibly even a VPS/VDS so that you can allocate more space than your hard disks physically have. And then in doing so you are opening up an administrative can of worms because you need to either police your own customer's sites, or write scripts to do the policing for you. Here we do a combination of both to keep accounts from abusing the server.

When you offer unlimited, people like to think they can just go ahead and upload their entire movie and MP3 collection to the server for $6 a month. Clearly you won't be making money as a host when this happens. If you want to offer unlimited it helps if you have a few guys to help you manage the server since it requires more work than a traditional hosting package, and it helps if you know how to write some scripts on your own as well. It definately is not all it is cracked up to be and the only reason GlowHost offers it (we were one of the last hosts to convert to the dark side) was to retain our current customers from jumping ship to other hosts who were offering unlimited.

The term is a bit misleading in my opinion, but since that is how the industry has coined the name, that is what we have to call it as well.

You can still sell "unlimited" the same way that GlowHost and many others do it. Just set some predefined packages like "Tier1" "Tier2" and etc.

Then each time your customer hits the disk space limit, they will request an upgrade to the second tier. Before you upgrade them, you look through their account and see if they are violating the terms of service in any way, which they almost always are, and then invite them to pay for a more realistic hosting package.

You should also consider looking into getting local friends and businesses using your hosting service. You can usually get local customers to pay the entire price of your reseller account and have plenty of space left over to resell. That's how many of the larger web hosts today got started and the same way we got our first dedicated server 10 years ago.

[Andrew Carlson]

It's been fully understood that unlimited plans are not fully unlimited(I should have mentioned this).

"to retain our current customers from jumping ship to other hosts who were offering unlimited."
I'm worried no customers will come aboard because I don't offer a competitive plan. I'm also afraid of selling an unlimited plan but not show unlimited resources, people will leave.

My Father reviewed the question and advised me on a better way to ask. Could you offer an "uncapped" reseller plan?(It sounds less useful that way)

Having bought unlimited plans and dedicated servers before, you can set the storage amount of a package to '0' and when you log into cPanel you will see the infinity symbol. My question was more towards aesthetics, then physical space. Up until recently I did have a dedicated server in the US but the collo. fees were getting out of hand.

Programming is a HUGE part of my life. I know Java, C++, Objective-C, PHP, and HTML/CSS. So security an such is not a large issue with me.

[Matt]

We don't offer those kind of packages even with our unlimited packages. For example, if you order an unlimited plan from GlowHost you will see the cPanel says 10 Gigs are available. This is our first tier. 20 gig and 30 gig are the next tiers after that.

Here is a post about it:

http://forums.glowhost.com/knowledge...mits-2313.html

The type of plan you are talking about is certainly possible but that usually done on servers that are not well managed and they usually break down a lot. These caps help us so we don't have to babysit the unlimited machines so much. If someone decides to upload their 2 terabytes of MP3 at 4 in the morning and you are sleeping you have put yourself in a bad position since most hard drives are not that big and the system will likely crash when it runs out of space.

So as you roll out of bed you have to then explain to all of your customers why the server went down, then you get to let Linux try to delete 2 TB of data on a production server which may not boot, which may require an on-site tech to fiddle with it, and once you finally do have a shell, while it does this remove process, it slow things down for everyone on that server because it will drive the load up during the removal process and until it completes which could be extra hours(?) of a slow loading server after its back online.

If you want aesthetics you could probably just write a cPanel theme to show "unlimited" here and that would solve that problem but then again I am not sure branding to that level works on shared servers with cPanel.

My best suggestion is to explain it to your customers how unlimited works if they ask. We are rarely asked the question unless someone wants to upgrade which surprisingly (or not, depending on how you look at it) is not that often.

[Andrew Carlson]

"If you want aesthetics you could probably just write a cPanel theme to show "unlimited" here and that would solve that problem but then again I am not sure branding to that level works on shared servers with cPanel."
Don't know why I didn't think of that.
In the index.html file I tweeked the stats part to look like this:

            [tr class="row-%"]
                [td class="stats_left"]%[/td]
                [td class="stats_right"]
                    % / ∞[br /]
                    [div class="stats_progress_bar"]
                        [div class="cpanel_widget_progress_bar_percent" style="display\{colon}none"]%[/div]
                    [/div]
                [/td]
            [/tr]
        ,rowtype,item,count,max,percent) display=lvecpu|lvemem|lvemep|diskusage|bandwidthusage,infinitylang=true,rowcounter=mainstats ?>
        </cpanelif>
        <cpanelif !$hascloudlinux>
        <?cp StatsBar::stat(
            [tr class="row-%"]
                [td class="stats_left"]%[/td]
                [td class="stats_right"]
                    % / ∞[br /]
                    [div class="stats_progress_bar"]
                        [div class="cpanel_widget_progress_bar_percent" style="display\{colon}none"]%[/div]
                    [/div]
                [/td]
            [/tr]

Resulting in:


That pretty much solved my current problems/questions, thank you for the idea!

[Andrew Carlson]

"If you want aesthetics you could probably just write a cPanel theme to show "unlimited" here and that would solve that problem but then again I am not sure branding to that level works on shared servers with cPanel."

Don't know why I didn't think of that.

Branding Editor > Edit Branding Style > Edit HTML Pages > index.html

<?cp StatsBar::stat([tr class="row-%"]
[td class="stats_left"]%[/td]
[td class="stats_right"]
% / ∞[br /]
[div class="stats_progress_bar"]
[div class="cpanel_widget_progress_bar_percent" style="display\{colon}none"]%[/div]
[/div]
[/td]
[/tr]
,rowtype,item,count,max,percent) display=lvecpu|lvemem|lvemep|diskusage|bandwidthusage,infinitylang=true,rowcounter=mainstats ?>
</cpanelif>
<cpanelif !$hascloudlinux>
<?cp StatsBar::stat(
[tr class="row-%"]
[td class="stats_left"]%[/td]
[td class="stats_right"]
% / ∞[br /]
[div class="stats_progress_bar"]
[div class="cpanel_widget_progress_bar_percent" style="display\{colon}none"]%[/div]
[/div]
[/td]
[/tr]
 

That gets me:


That solved all my current questions/problems.
Thanks for the idea.

"These caps help us so we don't have to babysit the unlimited machines so much. If someone decides to upload their 2 terabytes of MP3 at 4 in the morning and you are sleeping you have put yourself in a bad position since most hard drives are not that big and the system will likely crash when it runs out of space."

I could prevent this from ever happening without watching it 24/7, that's the only reason I would do it. But I now see it would be mostly useless to have.

[Matt]

Sorry, it looks like your post was moderated and the other guys working last night didn't notice it I guess.

Nice mod!

[Andrew Carlson]

Sorry, it looks like your post was moderated and the other guys working last night didn't notice it I guess.

Nice mod!

No worries, thanks.


I have some questions about Dedicated servers, if I purchase a dedicated server:
1. Can I install MS Windows Server 2008 Standard with my own CD key and not have to pay the $30/m?
2. Could I sell game servers on my dedicated box?
3. Are rules in place to prevent running game servers 24/7? (I could not locate this information, if I am missing a page let me know)

[Matt]

Those questions might be good for a unique thread so others can more easily find the information down the road.

I will have to check our partner agreement on the license key thing, but I would think it should be OK. Yes, you can run the game server 24/7 so long as you are within the allotted bandwidth limits.

[jamesrock]

If you want aesthetics you could probably just write a cPanel theme to show "unlimited" here and that would solve that problem but then again I am not sure branding to that level works on shared servers with cPanel.