Well as a host that offer multi domain hosting... I will be the first host to stop offering it. Most of us who are playing the numbers game will soon to realize its not good business offering Multi domain hosting.

But if you had a raq from Rackshack... thats a different story.

Maybe we should stop offering multiple domains hosting too ...:eek2: :unhappy: :D I agree, since most shared (except reseller) hosts are playing with the resources, multi-domain hosting kills the purpose of it.

I don't get it :( What do you mean by multi-domain hosting? Like parking a .net on top of a .com?

Its like

a sub.com pointing to sub.main.com

but when people view sub.com they only see sub.com....

The part which is killing me is:

People get a L200 account and want to share resources with their friends...

Have 5 domains sharing the 12 GB bandwidth.... Can easily be drained..... And most of us play the numbers game :bawling:

Possibly I'll be slammed for this one but... why not just stop playing so dangerously with the "numbers game" all together??

I've never been quiet about my feelings in this area. The "numbers game" works when it's used logically but all of this steep competition to offer more than the next guy due to the demands of the site owners and the fact that it's certainly a buyers market has caused way too many hosts to become so dramatically unrealistic with their offerings that both the host and the buyer are becoming... well..... screwed.

I see it time and time again on forums just like this one. A new host develops their package offerings -- not by what they actually have to offer --- but by what the other hosts are offering. I rarely see questions like, "I have a server with these specs and I have this much bandwidth available to me, and it is costing me this much, so how much should I charge to turn a profit?" Instead the questions often never include any information about what the new host has to offer at all they simply say "How's this package sound compared to others? Would it sell?" and users responding with their thoughts of the offer, but rarely with questions regarding whether or not the offer can be realistically achieved by what the host owns. Basic business sense has been lost :(

I do agree that offering multiple domains/sites to run on a single account does encourage the site owner to actually use everything the host has sold to them -- But why shouldn't they?? The host sold it to the site owner, the site owner paid for it and should expect to receive every last ounce of what they purchased.

Please note: I am _NOT_ slamming Synergy one bit for what was posted. Synergy is _CORRECT_ and the observation is a very real one that I agree should be discussed. I admire Synergy for being strong enough to post it! I am only offering my opinion, which surrounds the same problem Synergy has brought up. "Users are actually being allowed to use what they paid for..." my only disagreement is this:

Why should we discuss how to prevent the site owners from using what they purchased? Why not discuss how we can actually allow them to use every last bit of what we advertised to them?

Yep. We didn't use this from the start because it defeats the purpose of playing the average game. Letting them host 2+ sites is asking them to use up their bandwidth and more resources.

Multi-hosted domain: A 2nd domain on an account pointed to user-site.com/domain2/
Basically giving them another name based hosting account.

As a newbie I don't have the full knowledge of your industry ( but I'm liking it a lot ) but as a past business owner ( 3 of them all sold off and were not internet related ) I think Deb hit an interesting note:


1) the "bandwidth game" seems high risk for little reward
reasons: resourced used by specific accounts could kill the other smaller account and force the hosting company to buy "bandwidth" at bad pricing ( market rates or bumped up to higher bandwidth consumption rate level )

2) users whom can follow the rules and guild lines set by the hosting firm can ( and will ) exploit those rules.

I did a small survey of host pricing. If bandwidth cost are 1.45 per gig ( best that I think I saw in reseller pricing ) how can a host justify 10gigs at 9.95 monthly. Your only covering about 65% of your bandwidth cost, and your subjecting yourself to loss of 1.45 per every gig of bandwidth consumption over (about) 6.2 gigs.

Your overselling your bandwidth by 45%, you are better off trying to target a specific type of customer so that your overselling by a smaller amount (20%)

Due to ignorance I make the following statement ( standard foot in mouth, chew carefully, and don't shove it down so hard clauses apply )

Their should be a big shake out or a general awaking within the hosting / reseller community.

Side Note:
Having run an international shipping company ( ocean / air / general cargoes ) certain aspect of shipping seem to apply. One that comes right to mind is yield management IE: knowing how to spread you bandwidth demands so that you don't exceed your capacity ( i think that works more to host than resellers utilizing your inhouse demand records to know if your going to run at the 95percentile or dedicated ). something else comes right to mind. Low volume users pay more than high volume. EI 3 gig account is priced 30% over cost while the 20 gig account is 10% over cost.


-michael

Originally posted by Deb
Possibly I'll be slammed for this one but... why not just stop playing so dangerously with the "numbers game" all together??

I've never been quiet about my feelings in this area. The "numbers game" works when it's used logically but all of this steep competition to offer more than the next guy due to the demands of the site owners and the fact that it's certainly a buyers market has caused way too many hosts to become so dramatically unrealistic with their offerings that both the host and the buyer are becoming... well..... screwed.

I see it time and time again on forums just like this one. A new host develops their package offerings -- not by what they actually have to offer --- but by what the other hosts are offering. I rarely see questions like, "I have a server with these specs and I have this much bandwidth available to me, and it is costing me this much, so how much should I charge to turn a profit?" Instead the questions often never include any information about what the new host has to offer at all they simply say "How's this package sound compared to others? Would it sell?" and users responding with their thoughts of the offer, but rarely with questions regarding whether or not the offer can be realistically achieved by what the host owns. Basic business sense has been lost :(

I do agree that offering multiple domains/sites to run on a single account does encourage the site owner to actually use everything the host has sold to them -- But why shouldn't they?? The host sold it to the site owner, the site owner paid for it and should expect to receive every last ounce of what they purchased.

Please note: I am _NOT_ slamming Synergy one bit for what was posted. Synergy is _CORRECT_ and the observation is a very real one that I agree should be discussed. I admire Synergy for being strong enough to post it! I am only offering my opinion, which surrounds the same problem Synergy has brought up. "Users are actually being allowed to use what they paid for..." my only disagreement is this:

Why should we discuss how to prevent the site owners from using what they purchased? Why not discuss how we can actually allow them to use every last bit of what we advertised to them?

I totally Agree!

How can somebody offer 10 GB to $7? I think that that host are hurting the bussines.
You know, if you lease a server for $400/month and you have 100 GB to spend, you're paying $4 each GB, even if you get extra GB to $2, you need to pay a lot more to get an averange of $3 per GB.

I post a thread a few month ago about this, also Kiwi do it recently "Don't you think that host are pushing the prices too low?" That is the real bussines killer I think.

Just my $0.0002 (I'm saving resources) :)

The numbers game is something that the hosts force upon themselves and their customers. In my case, I had a web site with less than 1 Gig monthly traffic. Yet I was "forced" by my previous host to buy Plan 3 with a much greater bandwidth allowance because I needed mySQL. Of course I split as soon as I found a better host with a more flexible feature/pricing sheme.

As for the multiple domain hosting, whether a host provides it as a feature or not, does not really matter. Hotscripts.com has a great collection of redirection scripts which detect the requested URL and directed traffic to the appropriate subdirectory.

Pricing and quality of service in web hosting seem to not be related, the most expensive hosts (*****, webhosting.com, Interliant, etc) provide the worst service, and yet they have the most customers!!! Go figure.

Customers are attracted to hosts that offer multiple domain hosting because more and more people are buying more and more domains and need them hosted. Why spend $50 on 10 accounts that cost $5 each and give you 1 gig of bandwidth when you can spend $40 to buy 10 gigs on a multiple domain hosting server? The cost to the host goes down: only one account to manage, versus 10. The cost and effort to the end user goes down: $10 less and only 1 account to manage, versus 10.

I strongly believe that the customer should get exactly what they pay for with the option of buying more. Playing the numbers game may win out in the beginning, but eventually it will catch up. For instance, 50% of your customers may use only 10% of their bandwidth sold. What if their sites start to become very popular and start raking in a lot of bandwidth? They never exceed the bandwidth their hosts sold to them, yet the host kicks them out on the street waiving around the TOS madly in the air and claiming the customer was "using too many resources." That's absurd.

If the customer was truely using too many resources, with scripts or with something else, I could see that. But just for the bandwidth? Naa...

I've got a half dozen sites that i'm working on for my own use. I have 3 using a multihosting account and my bandwidth usually doesn't go over 50mb's. :D This may be a rare case, but that's the setup I like. Having more accounts is just overkill when i'm using so little resources.

It sounds like the problem with multi-domains is that users take advantage of this by reading it as multi-sites. They then have multiple domains pointing to different areas that are not at all linked.

Couldn't you overcome this problem by writing up something in your TOS stating that multi-domains are allowed but they must all point to the same main site not allowing any sub-sites within the main site(or even stricter, all domains must point to the home page).

I may be way off here, but I believe that many users would want this feature because they actually have multiple domains pointing to their site (i.e. doorway pages).

Chicken,
Could you please move this to the following thread under Running a Web Hosting Business.

Thanks. And again I'm sorry for the confusion.

<<MOD NOTE: Done.>>

The numbers game is something that the hosts force upon themselves and their customers. In my case, I had a web site with less than 1 Gig monthly traffic. Yet I was "forced" by my previous host to buy Plan 3 with a much greater bandwidth allowance because I needed mySQL. Of course I split as soon as I found a better host with a more flexible feature/pricing sheme. This is part of the point however. What was shown as available with each package is what it is rather than saying "we'll give you everything with the cheapest packages" yet hiding the many ways they'll prevent you from using everything advertised. MySQL, in my experience, is more a resource issue in other areas outside of bandwidth. Let's not forget that bandwidth is not the only expense.

The question for the host is:
Do you want to advertise what your offering or play 'the game' instead?

And the question for the site owner is:
Would you rather the ad 'feel good' or the 'reality'?

I thought if you point blah.com to domain.com/blah on cpanel boxes, email for blah.com dont work. Am I wrong?

Not 100% Correct but email will be forwarded to

user@sub.blah.com

This is all part of the growth of an industry. Older host get settled and new upstarts to compete price gouge or offer something new do be different. The old host complain (we always do), but soon follow suit. First it was sub-domains, then Control Panels, then webmail, then Virtual dedicated, ..... now multi-domain hosting. Give it a few months. Something else will appear.

Originally posted by Synergy
Not 100% Correct but email will be forwarded to

user@sub.blah.com

Subdomain email account doesn't work... so that would be useless

So there is a downside to parking domains to a sub :) I say just charge a $5-$10 setup fee to do this sort of "upgrade."