Reseller Plan or something else?

[mikedj]

I have a business question. I'm going to start building web sites for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits. Most of them seem to also need hosting. For the few that I have already done, I've simply pointed them to Jag and helped them sign up for an account. It would be simpler for me, and for them, if I could supply the hosting for them.

At this point, I have no interest in becoming a hosting company, but rather would like to give my web site clients an easy and affordable place to host their sites, while making it easy for me to access their web space. An added benefit for me would be the ability to generate a small, ongoing revenue stream from the sites I build.

So what's the best way to go about this? Should I set up a reseller account? As I read through the reseller info, it seems it is geared more towards selling the same thing Jag sells, i.e., web space and a control panel for customers that build web sites. Most of my customers won't need control panel access, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They might want the ability to add additional email addresses or something, but probably not much more.

Your thoughts are most appreciated.

Mike

[Ron]

If you really want to be in the hosting business... (remember, when there's a problem with the site they'll be calling/emailing you)

You've got three options:
Multihost the account under your longhorn (or SDX) plan
Bulk reseller
Full reseller

With Bulk reselling, you will create a CPanel for each client. This gives you flexibility if you want to move them to another plan (or they want to leave you), they are all self contained -- "See ya".

You will have a WHM panel, and access to all of their accounts' CPanels through WHM (no need to remember multiple passwords), and ability to increase their space/bandwidth allotments ($$). The only drawback I find is the need to log in separately via SSH to access the various home directories. Your master account doesn't have the ability to change to their userid.

I am not that familiar with full reselling -- they get full blown accounts on various machines. I don't know what you access to their accounts is. You're still the point of contact.

Good luck!

[mikedj]

No, I really don't want to be in the hosting business. However, I can see myself doing much of the maintenance anyway, since most of my customers won't know much about it. My thought is, if that's the case, I should make some money for my trouble.

You've definitely given me some things to think about. I didn't totally understand how the different reseller plans might work for me, but you've helped me with that. I still have some thinking to do on it.

If anyone else is doing what I'm suggesting, I'd love to hear how well it's working out.

Thanks for your comments.

Mike

[Jaded]

If they want you to maintain the site and don't need a control panel, simply multihost the account on your longhorn and charge them full price for hosting on a monthly basis. If they want to change at a later date you can get them their own account without having to refund any pre-payments.

But get them their own account if they want to tinker. Just let them know repairs are more expensive than maintenance.

[Ron]

There's issues with multihosting and email accounts, no?

[Jaded]

I don't think there is. I have several accounts on a longhorn and each account has several email and ftp accounts.

You wouldn't want to have a lot of heavy traffic accounts on the same plan but if the clients are small and the combined bw is within the daily limit, I don't think there would be a problem.

[Don McLeod]

Email accounts under multi-hosting used to be an issue. Email addresses had to be associated with the primary domain such as email@domain.com (although there was a work around using Firefox). A while back there was a change in the way cPanel handled the creation of email addresses. Now you can create a dedicated email address such as email@multidomain.com

One drawback is related to the overall number of email addresses created through a multi-hosted package. If the number is small - no problem. If you have more than five domains and each domain has 5 - 10 email accounts, then managing them through the cPanel becomes cumbersome since all the email addresses are are combined in one list with no convenient way to sort or group them.

A separate issue that may detract from the overall benefits of the multi-host approach is webstats. On the plus side you can get webstats for subdomains which would be multi-domains. However you cannot create subdomains within your multidomain. For example, if you create a forum on a multi-domain there is no way (that I know of) to keep track of the webstats on just the forum. All traffic to the website and forum are lumped together. With a primary domain you could install the forum in a subdomain and keep a separate track of the forum webstats.

Multi-hosting is an economical and efficient way to host a few web sites. It allows quick and easy access to all the sites through one cPanel. Some you may charge for, others are for development and yet others are for friends and family. You develop and manage the entire package.

[Gwaihir]

There's issues with multihosting and email accounts, no?

There were. They've been cleared up somewhere in the last year.

[jason]

However you cannot create subdomains within your multidomain.

Actually, as of a few months ago, this is possible. The downside to it is that the subdomain is still set up inside public_html and not the multihosted domain's base directory. So, for example, if you multihost newsite.com on new.oldsite.com and then you set up forums.newsite.com, the forums directory will be /home/user/public_html/forums and not /home/user/public_html/new/user as one would expect. This prevents you from having that forums subdomain on more than one site. It will also mean that you'll have to give your users multiple FTP accounts if they'll be making edits themselves.

--Jason

[Don McLeod]

Actually, as of a few months ago, this is possible.

Thanks Jason - checked it out and sure enough the feature for creating subdomains within a multi-hosted domain is available. As you implied, file/folder management will be problematic if there are many multi-hosted domains with subdomains. You would have to come up with creative names for analogous folders from different multi-hosted domains. The subdomain 'forum' could be used once and the next subdomain for a forum would have to be named differently.

I did a test and created a subdomain within one of my multidomains. I noticed that during subdomain set-up, the process in cPanel flipped out an error message but concluded that the subdomain was created. Also, I still don't see any recognition of that new subdomain within AWStats, so I still can't monitor the web traffic independently on that subdomain.

[Mikalee]

If anyone else is doing what I'm suggesting, I'd love to hear how well it's working out.

I'm in the same boat as you and I've recently started multi-hosting on my main account. As long as your clients don't need to access Cpanel themselves (and I don't have any clients that ever would, even if they could), Multi-hosting is definitely the easiest and most economical route to go.

Don said it well:
"Multi-hosting is an economical and efficient way to host a few web sites. It allows quick and easy access to all the sites through one cPanel. Some you may charge for, others are for development and yet others are for friends and family. You develop and manage the entire package."

I completely agree.

[Jaded]

Actually, as of a few months ago, this is possible. The downside to it is that the subdomain is still set up inside public_html and not the multihosted domain's base directory. So, for example, if you multihost newsite.com on new.oldsite.com and then you set up forums.newsite.com, the forums directory will be /home/user/public_html/forums and not /home/user/public_html/new/user as one would expect. This prevents you from having that forums subdomain on more than one site. It will also mean that you'll have to give your users multiple FTP accounts if they'll be making edits themselves.

--Jason

If you don't want to manually configure the different subdomains/forums etc. Fantastico allows you to designate the directory for forum/cms etc within the subdomain.

[mikedj]

Great responses, but, of course, I have more questions.

Looking at it from a cost perspective, my costs are:

Longhorn - $8/mo. (2 yr. prepay)
Bulk reseller - $20/mo
Managed - $20/mo. plus $2 to $8 per account.

Longhorn has its drawbacks as you've pointed out (I currently have multi-domains on my Giga+5 account, so I am familiar with that approach). Managed costs me more, but gives my customers a complete, independent account. If I understand correctly, Bulk is somewhat in the middle. I can sell as many accounts as I want under Bulk, as long as they remain within my disk space and bandwidth limits. Is that correct?

With Bulk, I can create branded cPanels for my customers. My questions are, can you customize the cPanels, i.e., include only certain functions, or is it a complete cPanel just like any other?

Does my customer have access to the ticket system, etc., via the cPanel or does all support go through me?

Do my customers know, through cPanel access that they are using Jag? I'm thinking of pricing issues here. If I price higher than Jag, will they be able to see that they could go direct to Jag for less? I have no interest in gouging customers, but simply making a fair price for my services. The final determination of that price depends on how much work I have to do. It may well be that, under a bulk plan, I could charge my customers the same prices Jag charges and make enough money to cover my workload, remembering that my primary income is building web sites. On the other hand, I may want to charge a bit more to cover the personal customer service that I will supply.

I see mention of Merchant Accounts and SSL on the reseller plans. Is that a system that will help me bill my cusomters, as opposed to the Longhorn route which leaves that all up to me?

Mikalee:

How many customers are you hosting that way? So far, the only things I've seen that my current customers might want are additional email addresses, but, frankly, right now, they simply had me set up a forwarder to their existing email addresses. I'm sure there will be some that want more than that, and some might even want some additional abilities such as stats, email forwarding, autoreplies, subdomains or similar. The difficulty in dealing with such things will only come with quanitity of customers. And, at this point, I don't really know what quantity will push me into that category. And I suppose policing is much easier with multi-hosting since the customer has no access to anything, they must go through me.

Mike

[jason]

Mike,

I believe that you are the first point of support for any of the reseller options. Your clients contact you and, if you can't handle the issue yourself, you open a ticket with JPC.

As for the CPanel skins, you can do whatever you want. As I understand it the skins are just a bunch of files with links and forms in them. You can remove links that you don't want your users to see, change forms' list elements to hidden elements to prevent them from changing options, etc. I have heard, though, that the CP template files are rather complex, so modifying the CP might not be a simple task.

A merchant account gives you the ability to accept credit cards through your site. Simply having one won't automate your billing, but there are programs out there that will. Note that there are several costs involved with merchant accounts: a monthly minimum as well as a set fee and a percentage of the amout charged every time you process a charge. In addition there are similar fees to use the gateway service that connects your site to your merchant account provider. With the JPC offer, the monthly minimum is $25, which means that you have to generate $25 in processing fees every month. If you generate less than that you'll still be charged $25. The fees with the JPC pan are 30 cents plus 2.29% per transaction. The AuthorizeNet gateway that comes with that plan is $15/month plus 5 cents per transaction (with 250 transactions free). Do the math--in your situation a merchant account probably isn't feasable. Its probably best to bill your clients and have them send you a check.

As far as branding--the reseller control pannel or your custom one if you create it will have no mention of JPC on it. It will list the server name as whatever.nocdirect.com. IF your client does a whois on nocdirect.com or the IP address they'll find references to JPC, but a causal client (of the type that you seem to have) won't come across anything like that.

--Jason

[Ron]

ACK! Paper Check? That's so 2003! LOL

Bill them through your PayPal business acount-- no minimums it's about .30 + 3%, or something similar. They can pay with a credit card using a form supplied and branded by PayPal, or if they have a paypal account, they can pay using that.

There are other brands for payment processing like this I'm sure, but PayPal is the most popular/recognizable.