Thanks for the responses.
That said, I do need to know, perhaps from someone who has wondered what to do, what the best solution is. Is Reseller Hosting worthwhile for me and my business? Or is it better to make the client host their own sites?
Hi,
We find that a lot of design/development companies that we host, prefer to host their clients sites on their behalf. This usually gives you more control and the ability to change or update the sites freely on a common environment. Instead of having to deal with different hosting providers, with different environments, different setups, policies, etc.
The actual solution you choose depends on your in house technical abilities. If you have the technical abilities I would recommend a Cloud Hosted cPanel solution where you have full admin access to the solution and can customize or change it however you see fit. We have a setup we do on our cloud environment that a large number of Reseller use that has proven to be rock solid and performs really well.
If you do not have these technical skills in house or simply don't want to worry about them, then Reseller Hosting would be the best solution. In this solution the hosting provider takes care of all the technical aspects of the environment and you simply setup the hosting accounts and manage them. In this solution there are a few questions you should be asking the hosting provider before deciding who to go with:
- Do they own & manage their infrastructure or simply reselling another providers infrastructure? You don't want to be a reseller or another reseller. You want to be as high up the chain as possible.
- Where are their servers located? If your customers target audience is mostly South African, then you want these servers to be located in South Africa.
- What is their hosting infrastructure (servers/networking/etc) and what are their backup policies? You want a provider with decent hardware (fast processors, lots of ram, and SSD drives) and a decent backup policy of at least daily.
- Try determine if they are over provisioning their infrastructure. By this I mean you don't want a provider who puts 50 Resellers on a server running SATA drives in raid 1. Over time as the resellers grow and the number of sites on the server grows, this server is just going to get slower and slower as database queries and site traffic increases.
- Do they offer you migration or upgrade solutions for when you outgrow their Reseller Hosting? Inevitable, if all goes well, you will grow your hosting to the point that you outgrow your Reseller Hosting, what solutions does the provider offer you in the way of growth?
Regards,
Dave
