Why is it when graphic/web designers talk about hosting, they only mention money and control panels and how many domains/clients they can stuff on the cheapest reseller acount that is already just one of dozens of reseller accounts on just one poor old underpowered server which is just one server among hundreds on a underpowered network with insufficient bandwidth?

Yet when network designers talk about hosting it’s all about Upstream Providers and Server Spec’s and Network Backbone and Available Bandwidth and QoS and Backup Power Capacity and Cooling and Storage Backup and Uptime and System OS and Memory Optimization and Database Tweaking, etc., etc.?

The world is chock full of incredibly bad web hosting that crumbles at the first whiff of traffic, and the primary reason is that people buy into the “anyone can be a reseller” nonsense. It’s the cyberworld version of Amway or Shaklee.

If you can’t control what you’re reselling, nor add value to what you’re providing to YOUR clients, why (oh why oh why) would you dream of doing it?

Looking to get rid of your remaining hosting clients? I’ll take them off your hands for you! Seriously!

Your point about email is a great one. It is probably the single most annoying / complicated issue about hosting because everyone lives and dies by email. And it can get you involved in a lot of daily communication with your clients about their email problems.

But, it can be nice to be the guy your clients go to for everything. It’s a great way to stay in the loop on what they are up to.

For email (and other apps such as calendar and docs):
http://www.google.com/a/
This way you can sell your hosting with very little concern, and outsource the email handling to google. Its not only reliable, but the absolute best spam filter on the net, in my opinion!

Colis, this is superbly informative, with some real meat on the bone. I have been toying with the idea. Some of my blog consulting clients have asked. I’ve shied away from it precisely because I envision the nightmares you describe, while doubting the money would be worth it. In my situation, the majority of my clients already have a site or even a blog, and they want to add a blog or improve the site, so I don’t know if I’d get the numbers to make the money worth the hassle.

Chad, that’s a great idea, separating out the email and apps from the rest by using Google Apps. I happen to love Gmail and Google Docs, and wouldn’t have any trouble recommending them to others.

Could anyone recommend a solid reseller program that’s more stuff than fluff?

VonSkippy’s points make a lot of sense. I think unless you can add value it not a good idea. Maybe if you’ve got half a dozen small clients with small static sites it might seem like a tempting option for some easy money. But I think you can run into a lot of unexpected problems.

For example you find yourself in the position of trying to explain ongoing power outage problems in California, to clients based in New Zealand. Problems that you can’t do anything to solve, other than migrating everyone to a new hosting plan. Which could mean unpaid work and a lot of unhappy clients, all unhappy at the same time.

Also if you part ways with a client and their new web developer comes knocking on your door asking for hosting account details. You suddenly need to think about migrating not only their website. databases and domain names, but also any IMAP email stored on the server, plus passwords which you may not have access to, and web stat logs which you’re clients may depend upon for their annual reports.

I think I’m more content just to get the odd rewards payment when I refer new clients.

lol… nice to read this experiences…
I wanted to… i will still think… but probably will either way. Will just try do it the wright way.

Thanks for the infos

I set up all mail with Google, who I find to be very reliable. And charging a fee to set up the service means I get the profit and don’t have to palm my clients off to the ridiculously expensive Australian hosts that charge about $100 a year for a .com.au email address.

And then yes, I have a reseller account that allows unlimited domains for a minimal fee each with cpanel. It’s not too pricey and the servers are faster than any other I’ve used. The downside is I have to do my own back-ups but I’m ok with that.

I think it’s a poor idea unless you really know what you’re doing. For me, offering hosting to the occasional freelance client and as a business itself alongside other offerings from my company, is a no-brainer. I have vast experience setting up and administering dedicated servers so, hey, I’m hosting my own sites, why not host others’ for money, too?

The biggest problem comes for people who find a host and do reselling. If you’re really lucky, that host will actually know their servers from a hole in the ground. I can’t count the number of hosts I’ve used with “amazing support” who didn’t even know how to track down an Apache segfault. One of the top-rated hosts out there took 12 hours to complete it, only because I was gone for 12 hours then completed it for them. When the server goes down or something stops working on your box, you naturally assume somebody is going to fix it quickly. Don’t be so naive. The host you pick may not even have a presence at the datacenter they use. You know that $100/mo premium you pay for “managed hosting?” You’re paying a script to ping your server ports every few minutes. That’s it. There’s no dedicated admin with 20 years of experience staring at your server status 24/7. Most companies only have one or two of these “Senior Admins” because they’re so freaking expensive to employ.

So, imo, if you’re going to offer server hosting, know how to run a server and do it yourself. Every server I have is custom-made and partitioned at the datacenter I get them for. The “path” is DC -> Me -> Client. That’s it. They build my box, plug it in, give me the IP, and say “good luck.” Contrary to popular belief, the safest way to host is without a safety net. If something goes wrong with the server YOU know how to fix it; if you’re on vacation you’ve hired someone knowledgeable to cover for you. If something goes wrong with the DC, you don’t need to wait through level after level of communication because the DC is who you’re hosting with.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re strictly a designer and have no desire to spend years learning the admin trade, there are still ways for you to do it that won’t end with clients yelling loudly at you and you praying whoever fixes the problem. Just do a lot of research and testing (like intentionally breaking something software-related and seeing how long it takes them to fix it) and find a host that knows what they’re doing. There may be upwards of 5 of them in the world

I don’t think it is as big a deal as you guys are making out, provided you think it through. Email is the biggest factor, which is why I send all that to Google Apps. It helps me sleep at night.

My host recently changed all it’s servers and made us do a manual migration, moving the sites and databases didn’t take long at all.

It’s worth thinking about what type of hosting you’re selling to what type of client. Some sites can afford to go down for a few hours here and there. No one is likely to be on your case. Others require that 99.9% service agreement and will jump on you the second it’s down. Generally I’d use my instinct to tell which clients would be good to host and which I should send elsewhere.

I have been offering hosting for my clients for 4 years. I have 3 dedicated servers and the income from the hosting is almost up to 50% of my annual turnover. I have found that as long as you apply the service packs and keep your software up to date you shouldn’t have too many major problems.

I had a hard drive fail but the company who supply servers fixed it in a couple of hours and only had around 20 mins if downtime as the drives were swapped out.

I spent a lot of time looking at different resellers before going with my current provider so its best to research this before deciding who to use.

Merry Christmas to everyone.

I just wanted to share a great (and easy!) little combo I’ve used for tons of clients, especially all those “friends” that need a website:

1 - Register a domain with http://www.name.com
It’s $5.95 the first year, but the best part is they have automatic setup with Google Apps, ie. Email.

2 - Fire up a free wordpress account, pay for the $10 domain mapping.

3 - Change the nameservers under your name.com account (the only part I haven’t really streamlined)

4 - That’s it! In about 8 minutes, and for $15.95 for the year, your client has a basic site and email. Charge whatever you deem fair! The great thing about wordpress is that for a lot of startups/small business it’s more than they need and they can updated it/edit it on their own totally taking them out of the loop.

When my clients outgrow the limitations of the wordpress.com account, we upgraded them to a hosted setup (more money!), and we offer custom template designs for them ($$$!).

@Gavin: Thanks for bringing up that aspect! I’ve been in that situation a couple times and it isn’t fun. But now, as with so much in life, the decision seems to be a choice of 6 of one or half a dozen of the other!

@Gavin It also mean more paid work, if you’re fixing problems for clients. But at least in this case you’re not to blame if they’re using hosting a proper hosting company.

Also if you manage web services for a client you should have a secure system in place for keeping a record of all passwords and account details.

Nobodies mentioned RAM. If you’re building web apps that use a lot of RAM, you need to be able to regulate how much RAM is assigned to each client account. Their needs could fluctuate throughout the year, during busy periods, growth etc, and you need to be able to charge accordingly. Plus ensure that you’re other clients aren’t adversely effected.

I use Dreamhost and that never runs out of Databases

I had done a videocast on webhosting as a business option long back which nobody bothered to see…
Anyway, in my opinion, freelancers shouldn’t tackle hosting, no matter how efficient a sys-ad you are .. as you said in the post mission critical hosting can wreck havoc to the entire business if something goes wrong and is not fixed properly.. and add to that support requests at odd hours.. all hell will break lose if one of your clients has a major problem at the same time as when you have to meet your important deadlines…
Anyway the hosting market is so saturated at an international level it is better to suggest a good host to your client and earn brownie points than open the door for a potential screw up by hosting them…
instead web hosting can be done at a local level, for local small businesses and getting them onto the web.. and perhaps use them and their site visitors as leads for your freelance work.. considering the scale the amount of support issues won’t be high and for sure won’t be something you will have to deal with asap…

If any of you are considering reseller hosting I would really recommend http://www.servwise.com, they have been excellent for us and there uptime is 100% and they have responsive 24hr support plus the prices are pretty good too.

I began selling hosting in 2004 and after the first year everything was running fine no complaints or major issues. Then i decided to take a well deserved snowboarding vacation… on the third day @ 2,100m i received a text message (to my surprise!! didn’t even think i would have reception) from one of my clients indicating that the emails were down and urgent deadlines needed to be meet!. So i thought Oh Sh*t as i was just after getting off one of the highest ski lifts and so i proceeded to snowboard down 3 different (some above my level), LONG slopes that brought be into the local village. I actually could snowboard right up to one of those all in one phone box’s with internet touch screen etc. I logged into the control panel (with all my snowboard gear on) and sorted the issue. Funny thing was after all the “James Bond” type drama, i texted the client to tell him it was sorted and he was none the wiser i was on vacation ha ha. And to this date i haven’t had any other issues with reselling!!

I have personally hosted and i get the rude but actually relevant question “what if you get hit by a bus then what do i do?” to which i usually respond with “i’ll be dead and not care about your website”

In any event its probably better to leave hosting to a company and not a 1-2 man operation.

To those of you considering entering the web hosting market because of this post: Stop and do some serious research before you jump into the pool.

First off, the hosting industry is quite saturated. There are companies out there paying up to $200 per sales lead — for a client whose annual revenue won’t even exceed half of that. Acquiring clients isn’t as easy as 1-2-3. While you may be able to convert your freelancing jobs & clients into some additional revenue you’ll also have an insane amount of additional responsibility to them.

Imaging having a design client who you need to respond to within 15 minutes at 4 AM when their e-mail becomes available or in the middle of Christmas vacation, dinner or while you’re stuck in traffic on the highway. It’s not all fun & games — and when clients rely on you for mission critical e-mail, data & security — and you fail? Your reputation has just got kicked down a couple of notches.

I’ll admit upfront that I myself got involved in the web hosting industry back in 2003 as a ‘hobby’ provider. For a few years I operated my own smaller

Tell me this, am I the only one who would rather refer clients to a ‘recommended’ host (but ultimately leave the responsibility of decision with them) and include an affiliate link?

I see this as the easiest way, and yet you can still make a little without the hassle. However, I’m fairly inexperienced when it comes to this, so I may be missing something.

I only offer hosting to people I friends/family and people I design websites for. That way, I know what I’m getting into (bandwidth, storage, SLA, QoS, etc) and I can always decline if I think it involves too much risk. I do love the ‘passive income’ aspect, but I will also state I’ve got admin experience with Windows, Linux and OS X, so I felt confortable in offering this service. I also like the fact it makes me a one-stop shop in most cases: design, coding, hosting and domain names.

As mentionned by Gavin, I also ended up helping out anyway, so I might as well get something back for it - and more control, so I know exactly how to install/config my websites/apps.

I’m currently using HostingZoom, on an Advanced Failover plan. 99.6% uptime, can’t complain - great speed too. And tickets (due to a recent massive migration to a new server) are typically answered within 4hrs.

This market has changed a lot over the last few years. All of you who are dealing with the “always on call” issue might be benefited by a managed service such as mosso. Mosso offers white label billing and white label hosting. It’s a pretty nice service, when the sites are up!

I also think it has a lot to do with what you want to offer your clients and the type of business you run. I can’t imagine being a freelance web professional and not offering hosting. I think it’s an integral part of the web design process.

** Also if you part ways with a client and their new web developer comes knocking on your door asking for hosting account details **

I’ve been the webmaster, webdesigner, server manager, web-everything guy at a company for a few years. I found the hosting company, I managed the domains and the hosting accounts, I developed the webiste and managed email accounts.

Now I am trying to leave that company and they are talking with other people to take my job… However… nobody knows a crap. So, even though “web development” companies say they know everything about it, and even though I have given them *all* the passwords to everything (cPanel, phpMyAdmin, etc), I still have to be the one setting up email accounts and domain redirects, etc.

I think hosting is OK, as long as you know what you’re doing (I hate people selling stuff they know nothing about, they’re a virus in the job market), but keep a “plan” for the day you leave or stop offering the service, or those who you are hosting decide to get a new site with a new developer… Have some contract and clearly state that you host the site as long as you manage everything, but as soon as they want to move on, you give them the keys and it’s *their* problem.

I notice from your posts that some people are nervous of the email side of hosting while willing to host the website. We’d prefer to do the opposite as email is what we work at. So if anyone wants to share the hosting with us, we’ll host their customers mail, provide webmail etc, and spam filtering and mail buffering of course, while you host the site.