Hello to all.

I have a question. I am looking to start a web design company within the next 2 years.

I have been looking at reseller packages, but I am not wanting to actually resell the hosting.

What I want to do is completly run my clients accounts. From setup, design, to monthly webmaster.

So I want to add in web hosting.

So I see with some places like hostgator, and others who have unlimited domains that you can have on an account. Would this mean that say I have 50 clients, that I can have 50 sites on 1 account?

It seems like the bandwith is a great amount so I would be safe. Being new at this I worry about going over with 100 gb a month as the reseller program has.

I have looked into a VPS account and it looks great, yet I am by no means tech savy. I WILL mess something up. To me it is easier to setup a new domain name, have it point towards a file, and upload my clients individual sites to it.

But I am not sure if this seems ok or not? Many might say "why would you want to? Let the clients run their own control panel." But I am targeting people who probably would never have a website based on the support and time needed.

Hence I will build the site, buy the domain, and give them hosting, all for a fee. So I woudl not need to sell actual hosting.



So any ideas or help woudl be great to see who I need to go with for this? Or if many hosts let you do this. I Am sure that a dedicated or vps might be a great choice. But my client base will take some time to grow, so the more that I have to pay out at first will be wasted.


I am just not sure if people do this often or if it is stupid?


Thanks everyone

I know of plenty of web design companies offering the kind of service that you describe, and it seems to work out well for them - so I certainly don't think your idea is stupid.

I would be very careful in selecting your hosting partner, and in particular, be careful with unlimited anything offered by prospective hosts - everything has a technical limit, and some things have also have some kind of physical limit (e.g. diskspace).

Also be aware that hosting accounts and associated terminology vary from provider to provider, and this is also influenced by the control panel software that they're using.

As a web designer, you probably have a good idea about the amount of bandwidth likely to be used by your prospective sites. I would be quite surprised if you were launching new sites (particularly for completely non-technical clients) that required anything near 100GB.

Hosting providers offering this large level of bandwidth also feel the same which is why they know that they can get away with it; they're charging you far less than they would if they expected you to reach that level. In order to do so, you would almost certainly exceed the processing resources provided by a shared hosting account (including a reseller account which is the same principle).

With regards to a VPS, there are plenty of providers offering a managed service, which should enable you to use a VPS (for enhanced stability, reliability, and control - e.g. over PHP versions etc.) without worrying about the technical side. However, as with everything, some hosts have a funny idea of "managed" so make sure you're comparing apples with apples when you evaluate the different providers.

Whether or not you start with a Reseller plan or a VPS plan depends on your budget (VPS is probably better, but you don't want to waste money if you won't really benefit from it until several months later - particularly if you're just starting out and money is tight etc.). Closely related to this, it also depends on the number (and size of) clients you're expecting to host to begin with.

*Shameless self promotion* - if you were going with layershift, I'd recommend you may want to start with a small multi-domain plan such as our 'Shared Plus' (or even a smaller one and add additional domain capacity to that instead) and slowly upgrade your hosting plan as you acquire more clients etc.

Other hosts may use different systems, and therefore you should talk to your prospective host to find out what their policy is regarding upgrades (i.e. any restrictions when you can do it?), and also whether there would be any downtime with upgrades between plans, and across different ranges they offer etc.

Hope this helps

Accounts like the one you mentioned at HG are for your sites only. When you start selling the space to others you are violating the TOS. You are also going to get kicked off for "excess cpu usage" long before you use a 100GB in a month. The plans are all scams. No way you are ever going to be able to use what they promised. Read and understand the fine print.

Now with a reseller account you are allowed to resell the space to others. Clients are others. The main reason reseller accounts look more expensive is that they actually expect you to use the resouces they sold you.

The average web site uses less than 50MB of space and maybe a GB of bandwidth. I doubt your new sites are going to exceed those averages.

A reseller account is considered by many to be better than a VPS for hosting a lot of smaller accounts. A VPS is about control when you want to run something or do something that is not allowed on shared hosting.

For 15-20 a month you can get an unlimited domain reseller account from a reputable company. You don't have to sell hosting to the general public. A lot of people never do. They do exactly what you are considering.

Hey thanks for all of the help. I am glad that someoen understands me. When I talk to the different hosting companies, its like they want to sell me everything under the sun, where as my requests are quite simple.

Damien, I will check out the company and see if it will work for me. I might be a year or so out before I go public, but I need a place for my own sites for now too.

So would 100 or 125 gb go a long way as in for sites?
Many of teh clients that I will be working with are churches and other smaller groups.

But if I get going real good and get like 75 clients in a few years, I worry about space.

Thanks very much

I do a similar thing for clients using wordpress. You definitely want to order reseller hosting. I tried doing this using HG's regular account but they kept hitting me for using too many resources, I switched to a reseller account at Innohosting and it's been smoothe sailing since.

I host close to 20 sites with no problem. I don't use any of the actual reselling features, just add domains and point as you were talking about doing. Most of the people I set blogs up for don't want/or cant deal with the cpanel. So this works fine.

Great post. You nailed what I am doing and where I want to go with my hopes and dreams of a business.

Sometimes it is confusing on what to do, because when your first starting out, you are blind to what is out there or what may happen. So I appreciate your post and the inspiration Duderawk that I am not alone, maybe this can work out.

Chris

Originally Posted by colochris

So would 100 or 125 gb go a long way as in for sites?
Many of teh clients that I will be working with are churches and other smaller groups.

As Colbyt mentioned, very few sites will use more than 50MB - particularly sites of the kind you mentioned.

Assuming a basic site with a handful of pages and moderate graphics, you will probably find most small sites use more like around 10MB.

Originally Posted by duderawk

I tried doing this using HG's regular account but they kept hitting me for using too many resources

duderawk hit the nail on the head here - this is exactly what many hosts do (i.e. lie); if they're offering x diskspace or y data transfer, then you should reasonably be able to use that amount of resources without getting your wrists slapped.

In most cases, the levels of data transfer "provided" are way in excess of what you can use in a shared hosting environment. This is particularly true since very few large sites are static HTML, and instead have some database driven element and/or scripting involved - hence more CPU usage etc.

You should look for a host where you can pay a reasonable amount, for a reasonable amount of resources - "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is" - and in hosting it's the 100% most accurate application of that wise saying.

It sounds like the important factors that you want from your host are:

• reliability - the reputation of your business and referrals for future work will depend on the reliability and overall performance of your chosen hosting provider
• easy upgrade path - since the idea is that your business grows over time, you want your hosting account to be able to grow too, without downtime/hassle. There's no point starting out paying for a much larger hosting account than you need, so you should look to upgrade as you get more and more clients

As you're not intended to get this off the ground right away, I think you have a good opportuntity to test providers on the first point (reliability) with your own site(s) and see how that goes.

I never think unlimited is a good word to see from a hosting provider, as it just isn't true for any type of resource. Even adding additional domains to your hosting plan increases server load because it makes configuration files larger. Yes, these are just text files, but remember that we're talking about 100's or potentially (at some hosts) even 1000's of domains on a single server - each domain may have 10 or so lines of text... how big do those files get...

You shouldn't expect to be able to host 50+ domains in one hosting account without paying a different price to someone hosting 1 domain, as the resource usage is very different. IMO (as someone in the industry), I believe that any host offering this kind of arrangement at the same price is either overselling and/or doesn't care about the quality of service they're providing.

I would suggest looking at providers that can potentially cater for your needs through your entire business lifecycle (i.e. from small beginnings, up to grand success) - since a VPS (and even a dedicated server) are likely to be useful to you one day, it may be good to find providers offering these and suitable shared/reseller plans for your immediate use. It can be hard finding a decent hosting provider, so when you find a good one it is often easier to stick with them than risk your business (literally) with someone else because your needs change.