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Does anyone have experience with reseller hosting for your clients? I had to ask my last client to go find a hosting provider and then get back to me so I could upload their site. However, I would have loved to be able to handle the hosting providing myself.

So does anyone have some kind of advice or perhaps some noteworthy reselling providers?

From our Managing Director who is currently hosting a couple of dozen clients.

“We use a dedicated server from WiredTree (http://www.wiredtree.com) and resell hosting packages to match customer requirements.  Why not check them out and if you have any reseller related questions, I’d be happy to answer them.”

Martin

 

Lease a server from Media Temple, get the resellers package and the great (mt) team of specialists….

We haven’t looked back,

-Lee

My advice on reselling hosting for your clients…

DON’T!

Assuming you have plenty of work as a developer, hosting is not worth the effort and generally a pain in the ass.  Hosting providers make pennies on the dollar and survive by hosting huge numbers of people.  How can you build a business model from that?

A good developer should outsource tasks when possible.  You can’t do everything nor should you even try.  By outsourcing those things outside your core, you can provide the best experience possible for your clients. 

Hosting is a perfect service to outsource.  I think this is a common mistake developers.  Hosting seems to be a good supplement to services developers can provide but IT IS NOT!  Leave it to the hosting provider to give support and to take the flack when websites go down.  Trust me, after you have spent a couple hours on the phone with a clueless client trying to get something silly like email setup then you will know what I am talking about.

I do recommend finding a number of good hosts for any given situation and directing your customers to those providers.  You can create some sort of relationship by speaking with the support providers, setting up your affiliate accounts (if applicable) and generally checking in on your clients every once in a while to make sure they are happy with the arrangements.

Here is a list that I have found to be pretty good.

First of all, look in the right forum for your question.

webhostingtalk.com

And here are the hosts I have found to be good…

Dedicated servers: 

Softlayer.com:  Go ahead, just try to find a bad review for these guys.  They are probably the most often suggested for hosting on affordable and flexible dedicated servers.

VPS:

Slicehost.com:  If you don’t need a dedicated server (which you shouldn’t unless you need a high end dedicated) then these guys are the best and low priced.  They are so popular they have a waiting list to get on their hosting plans.  The biggest downside is they don’t provide IP addresses which is a big dealbreaker but they will be offering them as soon as the next couple of weeks though.  Get on their waiting list!

Joyent.com:  These guys have some interesting plans going because they run on Solaris containers (Solaris version of a VPS) and they have flexible plans.  They are more expensive but they offer things like hardware load balancing which Slicehost and many other providers do not have available.  I believe Twitter is using these guys after their first hosting provider dropped the ball on them.  Do not use their shared hosting.

Shared Hosting

Enginehosting.com:  Part of the Ellis lab umbrella.  Who better to run Ellislab products than these guys?

NOTE ON RESELLER HOSTING:  DO NOT use a shared reseller hosting plan.  Shared hosting is not good enough for a serious business.  I don’t care how good the hosting is, you will have problems.  If you must use a Cpanel based reseller option then get a VPS (don’t skimp of resources, get at least a gig of RAM) or a good dedicated.  A good VPS is much better than a cheap dedicated unless you have specific needs that can only be handled by dedicated so I would only look at dedicated if you need much more power than a high end VPS would provide.

Final reason not to do your own hosting:  Security and generally doing things right.  A monkey can get a VPS or dedicated with Cpanel and setup hosting accounts.  The tricky part is getting things right when problems develop.  Hosting providers are (hopefully) experts in securing the server, keeping things updated without breaking stuff, compiling and installing software when packages just won’t get what you need, dealing with ridiculous configuration files for server software, and taking all the crap when things go wrong.

There are some contradictions to my post which is why I leave this stuff up to clients.  A business should almost never go with shared hosting yet most businesses (and developers) don’t have the expertise to really do a VPS and dedicated the right way.  There is a lot of middle ground that simply does not get covered in the industry.  Ideally a business would would have the funds to get a totally managed package either from the provider or by outsourcing the admin tasks.

Have fun!

I would say that there is nothing wrong with reselling hosting to small or medium sized sites. Just host their site on your own server. If its a small local business that doesn’t get a lot of traffic, than there is nothing wrong with hosting it on a shared server.

Using Dreamhost as an example, since I like them but you could do this with almost any other hosting provider. What you do is just setup the small customers under your own account and any medium sized customers would require their own hosting account. 

Dreamhost has a new service that called Dreamhost Private Servers that would recommend for these “medium” customers. With web caching and proper configuration of your website and code, even a regular Dreamhost account is more than capable of withstanding a Digg or Slashdot. They give you enough bandwidth to host a semi-popular site.

Large customers are going to run into either 1 of 2 roadblocks, Bandwidth or Diskspace. So if know you will need more than 500 GB disk or 5 TB bandwidth, that Dreamhost provides for the client than start looking for dedicated hosting companies.

Now there are a lot of them out there, but here is one good one. Cari.net where you can get a top of line machine with 2 TB disk + 10 MB unmetered for about $1000/ month. Beyond that, dedicated hosts such as these will work with you to build clusters of machines.

Sure, a small site can be more of a pain in the ass than a big site.  It all depends on the client.  The client is the time waster, not the site itself.