How busy does a small reseller get?

If thou are looking to make it big, then you will need to spend a lot of time and effort. Initially, on marketing and getting new clients. Subsequently, as you gain traction on support, counting partnership/deals, upgrading your portfolio to vps and dedi.
 
It is good idea, but you got to care about clients, they require customer service, which isn't easy to come-by.
 
For my first year in business I was on a reseller account paying around $15 a month - before switching to my own dedicated I was grossing around 600$ revenue monthly.

Even now with a few dedicated servers I don't find the work load to be unmanageable by any means! Maybe a ticket or two a month. The amount of support tickets and issues is going to heavily depend on your target client though
 
Collabora said:
Poor advice. Sadly, too many hosts are like these, learning server management on production servers. They should learn server management on a lab server, while they are reselling, not on the customer's server -- vps or not. This would make a better host

When I first started hosting there was really no such thing as a VPS (at lease in hosting market). I had to go from reseller to dedicated (to colo). But I already knew how to manage a server since I was a sys admin by profession.
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easyhostmedia said:
It is not bad advice as yes learning on a test server, but their are processes that need to be learned on a production server. I learned on a production server without any problems towards clients. I now have a test server where i can replicate issues to learn
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Sounds like good advice to me. Start with a reseller, when you need to go with a VPS then later on to a dedicated server. Of course if your learning (as we all should be with the changes) test servers can be easily made available, coupled with a managed VPS you can't go wrong... Well, if a customer on our VPS gets something wrong we'll fix it anyway as we offer fully managed servers, so a quality managed company should be able to keep things moving for its clients :).
 
Hello.

You can become a good host if you have been a customer in the past so you know how it feels to be in end users shoes. Then you should become a reseller and run your business for a while before getting a VPS or a dedicated server. This way you have experience in all levels. It will help you when you are actually selling reseller and shared hosting to customers.
 
cPanel can also be installed on a 512MB server, but will be very slow,and get slower if you add websites so it is recommended to use at least a 1GB server
 
realbux said:
cPanel can also be installed on a 512MB server, but will be very slow,and get slower if you add websites so it is recommended to use at least a 1GB server
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You mean VPS right? as you would really have a hard time finding 512MB dedicated servers :) .

VPS optimized cPanel license can be run perfectly well in a VPS with 512MB memory assuming that your VPS provider is not overselling, you can even run it on a 256MB VPS but as realbux said it will be slow. As a plus point if your provider is running SSD servers then 512MB will be perfectly fine.
 
Cryptonomicon said:
Just curious about reselling - perhaps that's how it stared for all of you as well ....

Anyway if I assume a "typical" small reseller being effectively a one man shop with a bit of advertising.

How busy does it get ? How many new accounts would you be adding a day and how much time do you spend fixing user problems - or is small (one man) reselling just a no go - as soon as you add users you need a full time support team.
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A small reseller may add 3-10 accounts per week. If you only offer webhosting,support tickets are few and far between so a full time support teamis unecessary
 
Cryptonomicon said:
Just curious about reselling - perhaps that's how it stared for all of you as well ....

Anyway if I assume a "typical" small reseller being effectively a one man shop with a bit of advertising.

How busy does it get ? How many new accounts would you be adding a day and how much time do you spend fixing user problems - or is small (one man) reselling just a no go - as soon as you add users you need a full time support team.
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I assume most companies start with a reseller business. At the beginning it's very important to have a good hosting provider with great customer support, so in many times you can forward your clients' issues to them, from that point everything looks fine - you spend minimum time to resolve problems yourself, but rely on your providers' professional support, which also manages server for you - this is the advantage of the reseller business.

But as far as you grow, soon or later time comes when you'd move to the better solution - that solution could be a managed server. And again, if you've selected good management team, they'll handle tech. issues and you'll get some free time, of course if you wish to do sysadmin stuff, you can always learn, but as from our experience, mission critical works must be handled by the professionals.
 
I personally think most of the tickets you would ever receive should be during pre-sales and the first week of any new client. As long as the service is already configured properly and running without any problem, most clients really do not even submit a ticket at all.
 
Cryptonomicon said:
Just curious about reselling - perhaps that's how it stared for all of you as well ....

Anyway if I assume a "typical" small reseller being effectively a one man shop with a bit of advertising.

How busy does it get ? How many new accounts would you be adding a day and how much time do you spend fixing user problems - or is small (one man) reselling just a no go - as soon as you add users you need a full time support team.
Click to expand...

To Answer your Questions,

You can start out as a reseller but that does not give you full control of your server you may be limiting yourself, I am not saying you can't do it but that is not the way I started my company. I started with a vps, It gives a bit more control over what you can allow and not allow.

a One man shop can have hundreds of small low bandwidth and low space clients that require almost no support to just a couple clients that need more support it truly depends on who you target.

There is never a known fact as to how many clients you will add a day that is all based on advertising and such. So no one can truly tell you how many customers your company will get per day.

Within a month of my company starting I gained over 10 clients. Advertising in different forums, locally and telling my friends and family about the service. I still gain a few clients a day I love it.

If you have any questions you can always pm me or contact me at my website.
 
I actually own three resellers. one large and two per say medium size.
I have all three of them set up differently to host different types of clients.

I'm a business consultant and own my business with employees and have piles of small business clients.

One of the things we found out was our clients were getting beat up pretty good by web designers and hosting companies and paying outrageous prices.

They would tell us they needed their websites but was costing them to much money and most of them were going to drop their sites.

We took a look a their sites and most of them were WP sites not going any where for their business and were the standard themes and they had no seo.

We started rebuilding their sites, not using any kind of themes, to be what they needed for their businesses and not hurting their budgets.

I bought a large reseller and hosted them free for one year. They loved it, they loved their sites and by doing that it drove more business to us by their word of mouth.

At the end of the first year we had filled the reseller up and did a survey on bandwidth and space each client needed.

This helped us to downsize or upgrade each of their packages. I bought another reseller and moved the smaller clients to it.

The I bought a reseller to handle artist, potters, blacksmiths, woodworkers, and small trades.

In 12 months we had very few support tickets mainly because we manage their sites also. I also have end user support with my resellers.

We love the resellers and have no intentions of moving to a vps or dedi. The resellers work best for us and our clients are happy.

Profits? Yes i make a profit, a large proft but not a living with my resellers.

They're fun for us and it gives us a one on one with our clients...turn key for them and they have only us to deal with.

Oh, and I'm new to the community.

Kabe
 
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