Ok. After 4 days of marathon search , finally, I am forced to accept that I am a novice and that I must give up now and take guidance from Gurus instead!

So, Gurus, here's what your novice disciple is looking for :

Package I want:-

(1) Unix Reseller Plan; 2 to 4 GB Space ; 20-50 GB Bandwidth ( Actual usage; not allocation; both space and bandwidth)
(2) H-Sphere or equally powerful (Reseller oriented) Control Panel
(3) Web-based, easy, site builder for our non-tech clients ( e.g. SiteStudio )
(4) All the other bells & whistles that are commonly offered with such packages

Hosting Company I Want:-

(1) Should be in business for at least 1 year and preferably does not serve the end-users.( i.e. does not offer shared hosting - well, in the offline business terms, it should preferably be only a "wholesaler" and not a "retailer" )
(2) Should have their Servers in a reputed/reliable Data Center in the US (I'll perhaps prefer the companies who have their servers collocated/managed owned by some 3rd party, reputed big D.Cs to those who have their servers in their "own" smaller D.Cs )
(3) No more than 45 minutes support response time- 24/7 ( Ticket, forum, chat, whatever method-phone support not necessary)
(4) Size of the company does not matter--- **Type of management does! ** -- I'll prefer a company whose CEO has a sales/marketing background ; who understands that our success is their success. ( I hope I don't annoy any of you Gurus who may have basically technical background. I never mean to say that technical people can not be reliable businessmen. )

How much we're ready to pay :-

Up to $50 per month- to start with . ( But it could be lower or higher; price is not the biggest deciding factor. )

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Well, I would also like to tell you which companies I liked so far during my 4 days search.

Matrixreseller.com
Diy-hosting.com
Ourinternet.us


But each of them has its own positive and negative point. I would certainly like to share my personal opinion about them with you.: ---

::: Matrixreseller.com: Actually, I was about to sign up with them because they offer packages quite close to what we want to start with. Then I stumbled upon some amateurish (in my personal opinion) postings and counter-postings by them on this forum which I initially thought were from some of their junior techies and so simply ignored them. But then I discovered on the forum itself that they were actually from their CEO.( All the posts & counterpost, I'm talking about, were from person nicknamed "Vortech" who, I iniitilly thought, was a part-time techie of the company who did not know much about the company's long-term marketing strategy and was hurting company's goal by his/her personal non-professional ego-talk.) This was a genuine shock for me and it ultimately stopped me from taking the jump. Though it has certainly not changed my view of what they offer. Because, first of all, I'm still not sure that "Vortech" indeed is the CEO of the compnay. Because I still cannot believe that a CEO can really hurt his/her own company by his/her ego-talk. Any way, those of you, Guru or not, who have practical experience of dealing with this company, will be in a better position to comment. I am very much interested in knowing your first hand experience as this is a company I surely intend to consider. That's why I spent so much time on this company.

::: Diy-hosting.com: I could not find as much about them as Matrixreseller on the forum , so could not dissect them well. But they seem to offer hard disk space on the basis of allocation; that I find surprising. But I may have misunderstood; please correct me. Though their offer of domain registration thru their own enom account is wonderful.

::: Ourinternet.us: Well, I may not have included them in my shortlist as they seem to be less than 1 year old. And by no means, sounded very professional. But again I may be wrong. But I just found their reseller program to be not very far from what we are looking for. But then they are not pure "wholesalers". They do offer their services to end-users. Well, But on the other hand, I believe, both of my other two choices seem to have separate websites offering to end-users too. So, this doesn't seem to be a big disqualifier for this seemingly newcomer.

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Well, let me first declare that , by no means, my observations of these valuable reseller companies can be taken as seriuos " Reviews" . I am too novice to pass any comments on these persuambly big players of their industries." I AM ABSOLUTE OUTSIDER & NOVICE" I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMAION WHATSOEVER OF WEBHOSTING INDUSTRY.

Having said that, let me come back to my purpose --- I am pretty sure that there are tens; if not hundreds, of hosting companies fitting our criteria that I missed out and that you, Gurus, are going to recommend me now. I, as a real obedient disciple, am ready to listen to what you experts are going to tell me. And based upon that, I am going to take decision for my company.

Those of you who might be interested in knowing about us, we are a small "offline" Business Consulting Company offering our business & export consulting services to a small and select client-base. Now we are planning to diversify into e-business consulting and are going to offer hosting/web-development services to our existing client-base as a part of new diversified services.

Every host has their ups and downs....

As far as Hsphere:
1.) You will need Actual usage (also called summary disk usage)
2.) SiteStudio is a big plus :)

As far as the Comapny:
1.) Make sure they have been around a while. I see so many hosts on here that disappear on these forums every day.

Wow
What informative post.
To be honest, I am very happy with reseller-center.com. They have all what you need; servers are good, nice support and fast network. They take care of their customers. This is only four months review but for this time everything is OK. They do not have servers in well known data center, but uptime is excellent. One more thing that you will like is that their office is very close to data center, so they can replace hardware or do some server maintenance directly within minute. Support documentation is excellent (I printed more than 100 pages) and you need few days to learn using h-sphere, but everything is explained well, with a lot of examples. They have 24/7 support (30-60 minute response time) and big forum (as a guest you will not see all forums at their site) with average of 10-20 active users all the time, and usually get response for less than 5 minutes.

Well radv,

In fact I should've added you to my initial list. You do deserve that. I rechecked right now your plans ( 3rd time ) at your site radicalv.com . I do find you to be PERFECT. But as I said, i want pure "wholesalers" ; who cares about "only" wholesaling if you understand what i mean. Anyway, your plans are superb though i must say i didn't dissect you. I'm sorry to use the word "dissect"; but that's what you need to do to know a seller upside down!

n-goddess,

I understand what you mean. Most of our customers are resellers and we go as far to help setup their accounts for them or walk them through each step if they need it.

Good luck with your search :)

Be careful on the disk space usage versus allocation area. What you are asking for is really unlimted oversell of disk space.

If the host is not really good and on top of things you can end up on a WAY oversold server.

If you think about it a minute you plus 20 or 30 other resellers are going to be able to oversell their space and place 1000's of sites on a server with no limits really if the host is offering both unlimted domains and unlimted oversell.

Where you might only oversell by 10 or 20% some others on the server may oversell by 1000%. You could easliy end up on a server with a few thousand sites and slow as.

Well ,

I seem to be such an idiot newbie that I don't even know how to reply. ( This is the first time I have ever come to any internet forum !! pls. excuse my stupidities)

Well, I intend to reply "samdax" and having not found any reply button near his/her post, I hit the reply button at the top ( that is the only reply button i can find now). Well., i hope that "samdax" receives this reply and forgives me for my stupidity.

Well, samdax, thanx for your ref. I did go to reseller-center.com site. Everything seems to be ok; nothing special. Do you have any idea how long they have been in the market? Thanx.

Originally posted by n-goddess
Well ,

I seem to be such an idiot newbie that I don't even know how to reply. ( This is the first time I have ever come to any internet forum !! pls. excuse my stupidities)

Well, I intend to reply "samdax" and having not found any reply button near his/her post, I hit the reply button at the top ( that is the only reply button i can find now). Well., i hope that "samdax" receives this reply and forgives me for my stupidity.

Well, samdax, thanx for your ref. I did go to reseller-center.com site. Everything seems to be ok; nothing special. Do you have any idea how long they have been in the market? Thanx.

n-goddess, why are you being so apprehensive of being a novice? Every one starts from somewhere and this is your start. Ask as many questions as you can and make an informed decision. After all this decision of yours will be the basis of your company's goodwill in future.

I am pleasantly surprised though that you are making a very right decision from the very beginning and looking for a host with H-Sphere. Scalable, robust and centralized ... it virtually consolidates every major business operation of a web host in one interface. We love it from day one we started using it and you will too, believe me!

Do let us know in the end about your decision.

I wish you best of luck in your search.

Regards,

Our disk space is indeed based on allocation.

This is to avoid any and all possibilities of overselling. When a server has a certain amount allocated on it, we shut down signup on that server, and open up another.

If we billed on usage, we'd be opening ourselves up to inadvertent overselling, and that is strictly against our internal policies. We like to make sure that if a reseller pays for 5000MB of disk space, they get exactly that.

Regards
Simon

Originally posted by radv
Every host has their ups and downs....

As far as Hsphere:
1.) You will need Actual usage (also called summary disk usage)
2.) SiteStudio is a big plus :)

Just to correct you ever so slightly, simply because you said the poster would "need actual usage";

Summary disk usage is the pool of all "disk space using" resources. For instance, mySQL, MS SQL, Email, web, and Postgre SQL.

Again, actual usage has nothing to do with Summary Disk Usage. Summary merely means that instead of giving seperate quotas for each resource, you are giving them an overal quota, to disperse where they wish.

I'd massively advise against this, and have even spoken to other H-Sphere companies and urged them to do the same. The reason being that it then becomes impossible to watch overselling, literally.

There is no way to nip overselling in the bud, if you are utilizing summary disk allocation.

We allocate each resource seperately, to be able to watch each server, and know that the servers are safe. Yes, this can be left to chance, but chance has a way of biting you in the rear when you're not looking :laugh:

If you're currently utilizing the "Summary Disk" resource, i'd advise you hop on your CP box and disable it, sharpish :)

Simon

I've only worked with H-Sphere in a Windows hosting environment, but I think it's a great control panel.

It is tricky to get used to, but once you nail it... the CP works wonders.

Don't use H-sphere if you need security and privacy as a reseller. Also, I'll stay away if you need a cp in a different language than english or russian. This applies to SiteStudio too.

If you do go with that cp, Matrixreseller has some nice features added like the @mail webmail and per account spam filters, but that company lacks vision imo. They take measures on the late, when incidents happen and they're not always taking the right decisions.

Also, don't forget that Psoft tweaks your system once in a while and that tends to break things, but I guess all cps have their problems with updates/upgrades

Don't use H-sphere if you need security and privacy as a reseller.

Why's that?


Also, don't forget that Psoft tweaks your system once in a while and that tends to break things, but I guess all cps have their problems with updates/upgrades

No they don't.

pSoft only go in on a cluster if asked. Most take care of their own clusters, and do not need pSoft on there to fix problems.

If you are refering to version upgrades, then the simple solution to that is to wait for a certified stable version. pSoft have a very stable staff, and I find your comments rather confusing.

Simon

You can search in other threads about the lack of proper use of SSL for resellers. A reseller can only install a cert on the web server, every connection to other servers in the cluster are insecure.

Maybe they don't break your system, but they broke Matrixreseller's ones many times. Sometimes you just have to ask them to fix things, since it seems only them can repair their cp.