Hello, I've been doing a lot of research and talking and lately, I've found that not to many hosts like to offer the ability of customizable accounts.

Some hosts such as DATAPHORCE.com or OLM.net and I imagine their are others, such as Donhost.co.uk, have the right idea by offering resellers to decide on their own accounts and how to market them towards their customers.

However, even these host I find could go a bit further by allowing resellers to design or pre-designed scripts to automate sign up for customized accounts. I realize that hosts do have to maintain security and allowing many resellers the ability to use powerful scripts could come at a cost. But I believe that if resellers were in those cases forced to perhaps provide more information and a legal binding contract, hosts and resellers would then reach a more profitable and co-operative level for both.

Any one who knows of hosts that offer these abilities please reply or any other input is welcome!

Originally posted by PERL SCRIPTOR
I've found that not to many hosts like to offer the ability of customizable accounts.

If you ask most of the hosts for complete customizable accounts they will tell you "no, it would be a billing nightmare". I think that this issue will get better when more and better (flexibility!) hosting software (including billing) will be available.

The only way I can see it working (assuming total customization capability) is to set a price for every detail of an account: A price per meg storage, per gig transfer, per email account, per script, per FP extensions, per shopping cart, per SSL, per database etc etc.

Billing could be done but it would be a nightmare from the POV of the parent host as resellers will almost certainly try to nickle and dime the host over everything. I can just see an email "What do you mean you're charging me 75 cents for a CGI-BIN?!" Or "$1 for shopping cart??!!"

Jaiem, it doesn't have to be an announced itemized price list. You can design some "black box" kind of program where the reseller plugs in the specs of the plan, and out comes a quote. The specifics of how to get to this quote don't have to be public.