Decent Hosting Reseller Advice Required

N

NewPerspectiveStudio

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Joined
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Location
South Africa , East London
Hi Guys, I would appreciate it if you could provide me some assistance regarding reseller hosting.

I don't really want to mention names but most of the big guys we've been with are terrible. We found a home at domain.co.za and honestly their service has been incredible, the pricing, however, keeps going up, and yes I know you pay for quality, but we are struggling with our end users accepting these prices.

Especially when you see packages at R25 a month most people don't care until it all comes burning down. So we are looking for a middle ground so to speak.

We are looking at alternatives that seem very attractive but I feel there must be a catch one such alternative is host Africa reseller packages. I was wondering if anybody can share their experience with them as a reseller. Any other suggestions are also welcome, even if it stays with domains.co.za as I see this forum has a lot of support for them.

ps, we've had some discussions with a few companies but when asking for specs nobody seems to be willing to provide the same specs so we can compare apples with apples.
Regards
 
Domains.co.za is already on the lower end of hosting, so don't consider going even lower than that. Not to single them out - they're one of the better options for reseller hosting - as the same applies to Absolute Hosting, Xneelo and Elitehost. But these are all super bulk environments using cPanel or DirectAdmin (or Xneelo's terrible KonsoleH).

Serious quality hosting should be self-managed with your own servers/instances, your own security setup and a high-end panel like GridPane, RunCloud and so on.

None of this is your current problem. The problem is that you're not justifying your pricing to your clients.

Good managed hosting includes, at a minimum, the following:
  • Compute-optimised, modern server hardware
  • 99.95% uptime
  • Minute-by-minute uptime monitoring
  • Multiple layers of local and remote backups
  • SSL certificates
  • Malware scanning and removal
  • Web Application Firewall
  • Server-level object and page caching
  • Premium SMTP mail sending
  • DNS management
  • Business-grade email (e.g. Google Workspace or MS 365)
  • Performance optimisation & monitoring
  • Image resizing and compression
  • Platform and plugin updates
  • Disaster management
  • Developer support
So find a way to package something similar into a service that is worth paying R400+ per month for and makes your clients and prospective clients feel that they absolutely need such a hosting solution.
 
Depends on what you are doing? Tiny Hosting starts from R10pm but you are getting what you pay for.

If it's just a basic business card website sure you can find cheaper solutions, but if you are doing anything like e-commerce have thousands of users at the same time. Creating and processing images etc. You may need to consider upgrading by paying more.

Also you need to look at other specs besides storage and database limitation. You need to know how many processes you can run at the same time etc.

1659877535347.png
^ This is Open Web Reseller Options. They start from R100pm retail.

I don't use them for my own domains. I'm a reseller for my host and can help you with cheaper hosting but it depends on what you already get with your host. I can maybe match them with better resources let me know what you are getting.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Bryn said:
Domains.co.za is already on the lower end of hosting, so don't consider going even lower than that. Not to single them out - they're one of the better options for reseller hosting - as the same applies to Absolute Hosting, Xneelo and Elitehost. But these are all super bulk environments using cPanel or DirectAdmin (or Xneelo's terrible KonsoleH).

Serious quality hosting should be self-managed with your own servers/instances, your own security setup and a high-end panel like GridPane, RunCloud and so on.

None of this is your current problem. The problem is that you're not justifying your pricing to your clients.

Good managed hosting includes, at a minimum, the following:
  • Compute-optimised, modern server hardware
  • 99.95% uptime
  • Minute-by-minute uptime monitoring
  • Multiple layers of local and remote backups
  • SSL certificates
  • Malware scanning and removal
  • Web Application Firewall
  • Server-level object and page caching
  • Premium SMTP mail sending
  • DNS management
  • Business-grade email (e.g. Google Workspace or MS 365)
  • Performance optimisation & monitoring
  • Image resizing and compression
  • Platform and plugin updates
  • Disaster management
  • Developer support
So find a way to package something similar into a service that is worth paying R400+ per month for and makes your clients and prospective clients feel that they absolutely need such a hosting solution.
Click to expand...
Yes, we have most of that. We do offer dev support which works well. Sorry for rehashing such an old thread but I tend to agree more now. I guess we were reluctant to hear the truth.

After some research for next year, we could be bringing in more than double and keep our pricing the same. We would be happy to increase dev support just to make the plans more lucrative for clients as this always leads to extra work.

Unfortunately as great as our experience has been with domains.co.za over the years their price point has now become almost double that of other providers albeit their servers may be different we have not picked up anything significant difference in our testing with other providers.

We recently had to do some work with a client on Arihost, and we as always told the client about running an online store on a shared server. We had the prototype on our server and moved it over after approval and to our surprise it was running the same in terms of speed and handling loads, not fantastic, but about the same.
I'm not sure if Afrihost upgraded their servers but I don't feel like this was always the case. Im not advocating for Afrihost or Domains as I feel they have their pros and cons. It's just we expected that performance gap and it wasn't there, which reflects what you said above "all super bulk environments", we already had questions and that just opened it all up again along with it being the end of the year.

Support is another matter but it's generally not used on our side.
 
Juan Preuyt said:
Yes, we have most of that. We do offer dev support which works well. Sorry for rehashing such an old thread but I tend to agree more now. I guess we were reluctant to hear the truth.

After some research for next year, we could be bringing in more than double and keep our pricing the same. We would be happy to increase dev support just to make the plans more lucrative for clients as this always leads to extra work.

Unfortunately as great as our experience has been with domains.co.za over the years their price point has now become almost double that of other providers albeit their servers may be different we have not picked up anything significant difference in our testing with other providers.

We recently had to do some work with a client on Arihost, and we as always told the client about running an online store on a shared server. We had the prototype on our server and moved it over after approval and to our surprise it was running the same in terms of speed and handling loads, not fantastic, but about the same.
I'm not sure if Afrihost upgraded their servers but I don't feel like this was always the case. Im not advocating for Afrihost or Domains as I feel they have their pros and cons. It's just we expected that performance gap and it wasn't there, which reflects what you said above "all super bulk environments", we already had questions and that just opened it all up again along with it being the end of the year.

Support is another matter but it's generally not used on our side.
Click to expand...
I had to deal with Afrihost hosting recently and performance was every bit as poor as it has always been. With the worst DNS management I've seen from any ISP as usual.

If Afrihost was running the same as your own server, you should ditch your server as fast as you can (unless the server cannot handle the number of sites currently on it).

The 'performance gap' isn't only with shared hosting environments. There are many reasons for poor performance - merely having a VPS/VM instance/whatever in absolutely no way guarantees good performance. Most VPSes out there are complete trash. Going the self-managed route hugely increases the technical burden, but if you can get it right, the rewards are great.

A poorly configured and/or rubbish server could easily perform worse than well-optimised shared hosting. Whilst being wildly less secure as well.

That's why every part of your hosting stack matters. Use a good panel like GridPane. Use top-notch servers like Vultr High Frequency, AWS C5 (compute optimised), Google Cloud C2 (their equivalent) etc. I've had positive experiences with Absolute Hosting's EPYC VPSes too if you need something cheaper - the only reason I left was the slow network speed (only 100Mbps by default and R3k pm to increase that to a still measly 500Mbps). Vultr now has a Joburg location so I use them for all my servers. Their HF instances are the best in the business for web hosting.

Support doesn't matter too much until it does. And then you can really, really need it if you're dealing with a high-value client. GridPane has very competent support on standby 24/7, and anything escalated or initially marked as urgent goes straight to a qualified engineer. 24/7. You get what you pay for. Even the rather good RunCloud support can take 1-2 days to respond to a ticket.
 
Juan Preuyt said:
Hi Guys, I would appreciate it if you could provide me some assistance regarding reseller hosting.

I don't really want to mention names but most of the big guys we've been with are terrible. We found a home at domain.co.za and honestly their service has been incredible, the pricing, however, keeps going up, and yes I know you pay for quality, but we are struggling with our end users accepting these prices.

Especially when you see packages at R25 a month most people don't care until it all comes burning down. So we are looking for a middle ground so to speak.

We are looking at alternatives that seem very attractive but I feel there must be a catch one such alternative is host Africa reseller packages. I was wondering if anybody can share their experience with them as a reseller. Any other suggestions are also welcome, even if it stays with domains.co.za as I see this forum has a lot of support for them.

ps, we've had some discussions with a few companies but when asking for specs nobody seems to be willing to provide the same specs so we can compare apples with apples.
Regards
Click to expand...
Does it have to be hosted in South Africa? I've found hosting here -especially dedicated and high-end VPS to be horribly expensive and they still cap bandwidth like its 2004. I host everything out of the country. Of course i'm not keeping any POPI-related data which may need you to decide more carefully on a jurisdiction.
 
neoprema said:
Does it have to be hosted in South Africa? I've found hosting here -especially dedicated and high-end VPS to be horribly expensive and they still cap bandwidth like its 2004. I host everything out of the country. Of course i'm not keeping any POPI-related data which may need you to decide more carefully on a jurisdiction.
Click to expand...
No, not necessarily SA. The belief that South African VPS (Virtual Private Server) providers are overpriced and not as competent as their international counterparts seems to be a sentiment that resonates with many webmasters. I do not have enough experience to personally comment on it only having ever set up one and dropped it as it wasn't the blazing-fast beast I expected it to be. Despite my best attempts, it may be due to poor configuration on my part. It was an EPYC VPS. So again that could just have been my setup.
 
Juan Preuyt said:
No, not necessarily SA. The belief that South African VPS (Virtual Private Server) providers are overpriced and not as competent as their international counterparts seems to be a sentiment that resonates with many webmasters. I do not have enough experience to personally comment on it only having ever set up one and dropped it as it wasn't the blazing-fast beast I expected it to be. Despite my best attempts, it may be due to poor configuration on my part. It was an EPYC VPS. So again that could just have been my setup.
Click to expand...
I don't think its a skills and competence thing. That is there. I imagine it comes from expensive inter-connect, bandwidth and other costs and maybe just the fact that we were willing to pay more, so we're charged more.
 
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