In our extensive planning preparation (we are getting ready to think about how to plan to prepare for planning our setup), I wanted to hear from a few of you who started as a reseller and then moved to your own servers (either bought or leased).

How did you move the clients?
What prompted you to move from a reseller (#customers/learned how to manage server/ etc)?
Any other problems?

A large majority of the members here seem to think that starting as a reseller is the best way, so I was curious as to what the next step might entail...

Thanks Hosting Gurus,
CT

I started as a reseller, and I have to say it was the biggest mistake of my my webhosting life... When it came time to move to my first dedicated server, it was because i had too many clients for my reseller account to handle, and the server i was on was constantly going down. The guy tried to upgrade plesk on his server, and messed up alot of stuff... so i bought my first server, got it setup in about 2 weeks (configured, etc) and basicly told my clients (i guess aroung 30-40 ppl) that we are moving servers and to backup everythig they have. I then created all the accounts on the new server (ensim) and had everyone upload their content again to the new server... had some major mysql database problems, but after about 10 hours of support I fixed it all.... I lost about 1/2 my customer base...

Before getting ur own server get a good grasp on linux. goto a forum such as rackshack.net and read everything. Sit there for like 5 days straight and just read everything, cant stress it enough...

isn't there a way to move the content yourself, with tarballs via SSH or something?

you usually don't have SSH via reseller account... there are ways though, even through the control panel (ensim, cpanel, etc) but not when a server is going down for weeks at a time :P

Ok, I saw somewhere a program to move from one Cpanel To Another but it was expensive. Say I have root on the new dedicated, and reseller on another (no root), how would I move the accounts over.

Cpanel includes native functions to move from one cpanel serv. to another that work very well in my experience. I dont see why you would need to pay for a solution to do this...

But to do this, you need root on both machines don't you?

camptown,

You didn't specify which control panel you're using. If it's CPanel, I did the same thing your asking about and had no problems.

Originally posted by HiyaCorp
But to do this, you need root on both machines don't you?

No.

Originally posted by HiyaCorp
But to do this, you need root on both machines don't you?

No, if you move one account at a time, you can do it with just the specific account's password.