I am a reseller buying space off some else's server. I assume they are protecting their machines. I pick a company that has a good reputation, good uptime, etc...

OK. I have some clients now. I want to run an actual business but even though I personally review each acccount an abuser slips by.

I am not a hacker, or programmer, or technician. What is the best thing I can do to protect my account and business against abusers?

How can I spot/find abusers? How can I find the client that is violating TOS/AUP?


Thanks,
John

A big thing you should look out for is credit card fraud. If the customer signs up and their IP appears to be from Indonesia, but their credit card information appears to be from a guy in Kentucky, don't sign him up!
Using a reseller account, you have limited access to look into what may be taking place abuse-wise. Abusers tend to use a lot of resources (hence the term "abuse") so the way your host is going to check is by watching how many resources a user is needing with mostly standard OS tools such as "top" and by trend graphing software. One thing that you can try to do to stay on top of things is look through your customer's mail logs and web logs if you suspect something is going on.
We tend to stay away from scrutinizing our customers' logs unless we notice something screwy. We consider it an invasion of privacy. The abusers have a way of making themselves known. If you keep the fradulent sign-ups off your server, you are taking a big step towards preventing abuse.

Yes, it is very difficult to monitor raw cpu & memory usage with reseller accounts. You can certainly develop some basic cron jobs to scan for various scripts. Just keep doing what you're doing - screen customers. Investigate the history of each new domain name (if they have a history). archive.org can be great for this.