I’ve purposely tried to keep my company’s hosting business small: I’m the only person around to interact with customers (even though there are technicians at my datacenter who monitor the server and occasionally work on it), but I’ve tinkered with the idea of offering reseller accounts. Primarily, I envision offering 1 GB to 5 GB of storage space that the individual reseller would be free to divvy up as he or she pleased. You could give away accounts, charge whatever price you liked, etc.
Imagine some theoretical plans, such as:
- 1 GB of space/30 GB of transfers.
- 2 GB of space/60 GB of transfers.
- 3 GB of space/90 GB of transfers.
Plus the following standard features: weekly off server backups, Web Host Manager access so that the reseller can create custom hosting plans to subdivide the space and manage those plans, CPanel access for each sub account, etc. Essentially, this would be very much like a VPS, except that it wouldn't have its own root; because of the way WHM is setup, you would get access to many of the tools I have access to however.
What if I left the transfers as noted above, but doubled the disk space on each of those accounts? Then how much would it be worth?
Any thoughts on what such a service might be worth? Anyone actually interested in such a service (no pressure, just curious if I'm thinking about marketing something no one would want). I'd probably want to sell no more than five of these types of accounts, because one of my primary goals is to insure that the server is not oversold (most hosts sell more service than they can provide, based on the fact that almost no one fully utilizes their account; however, I'm not interested in doing that).
Thanks for letting me pick your collective brains.
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I get up to 5gigs of space, and 400Gigs of bandwidth a month.
With that I get unlimited postgre SQL and Mysql DBs, php, python (which I really want to start playing with but don’t currently have the time) and perl support. POP3, SMTP and IMAP etc etc for $6.95 a month.
As for pricing, well at 5gigs @ 400 I pay 6.95. Looking at your top one, 3gigs @ 90 I would say less then 4bucks a month.
By comparison:
http://www.ipower.com/
http://hostmysite.com/hosting/linux/295/
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?isc=gooh1006ab
Good Luck
I pay $6.95/month for 15 GB of space and 400 GB of transfer. if that helps.
Thanks, guys.
I’m not really looking to compete with that kind of host (note that none of those prices can actually pay for all of the services they offer — they must assume most users won’t actually utilize their services). I may or may not proceed. Primarily, I’ve tried to position my hosting service “upmarket” from places like iPower. (Partly by necessity — my bandwidth would have to cost about 1/7 of what it does to offer something like that.) I was thinking of competing more with Hosting Matters and other smaller places, which would probably put my plans in the $20-$70/month range…
We’ll see. I guess it doesn’t hurt to give it a try.
Yeah, that sort of thing would interest me. I’d first need to get some clients, but I’ve told enough people about you that I might be able to get a couple in if I sold the space. I think it would be reasonable to sell the small plan at $20.
You should note that you aren’t just offering space, but making the process of reselling the space very easy. WHM is a powerful way to manage CPanel clients. I’ve had that in the past and really enjoyed what can be done with it.
I envision having a setup sort of like yours when I get to FIM where I can put this service out to FIM missionaries so we can centralize all that good info into one place.
Thanks, Josiah. I think that’s roughly where I’m thinking. The two other packages might price in at, say $35 and $50, respectively.
I think WHM is a really worthwhile addition. Before I started doing my own hosting, I had two reseller accounts (one with and one without WHM) and I really enjoyed having it at my disposal. Its a bit less common (I think) for there to be the offer letting the reseller divvy up the space as he or she pleases, which I hope might prove a good thing too.
I’ve been trying to think of the best way to note exactly what I am selling. Probably the biggest feature, and the one I really try to promote when I provide quotes, though, is quality of connections. With the redundant connections, the Planet provides the best uptime connection wise I’ve dealt with. I’ve also been pleased with RHEL — I’ve been getting over the “mystical” 99.999% uptime since I’ve had this server.
That stuff doesn't sell that well though, despite the cost. I should probably spend more time promoting my multi-layered spam filter and blacklist, though. Hmm.
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