The following companies seem to offer the type of Windows reseller package I am looking for.

Basically, I want to buy one main account and then sell off the alloted bandwidth/diskspace for as many domains as I want. (Like what MCHost.com offers for linux.. and who I currently use as my reseller for linux based hosting.) I want to control the creation of each new domain myself (reseller control panel), and set my own package specs and prices. In other words, I don't want to just resell someones preset packages for a discount.

Not all the listed companies are the same (ie: unlimited for one price). Some offer their own spin on what I've described, but they are all similar in this sense. (Some offer 10 domains for a price, some offer 15, etc..)

I haven't done any real "in-depth" research on these comanies yet. In other words, I haven't made a spreadsheet and done a side by side comparison of features vs price vs support, etc.. I will get around to that over the next week or so. What I have done so far is send each company the email I have added to the bottom of this post. (It's in quotes)

All I've done so far is narrow the list of potential resellers from about 50, to these few. What do you think of them? Anybody have any thoughts on these companies?

http://www.experthost.com/resellers/
Price varies depending on how many domains you want to resell. Don't offer an "unlimited domains" deal, but still worth investigation. They seem very professional and decent deal. They responded to my email right away (within 24 hours) and were honest. I like these guys best.. Don't know why.. Just a gut feel.

http://www.cravis.com/partners/reseller1.asp
They offer several account types, each with a different number of "resellable" domains. Once you reach the limit of that package, each extra domain is $3. They replied to my email promptly and were also very honest.

http://www.m6.net
You select an account, and theres a set # of resellable domains for that account. They were the last to reply to my email and were decent enough anwsers.. However there are some negative threads on webhostingtalk.com about these guys. People say they have lousy support and that the reseller control panel sucks.

http://adehost.com/?pg=reseller.hosting
Cheap, has decent forums, 1 main account, unlimited additional domains. I am so far not impressed with the level of professionalism they have displayed. (Judged by looking at their posts in webhostingtalk.com and on their forums.) I list them here because they offer a great price, and I just haven't ruled them out yet. It's very unlikely I'll go with them, especially when they responded to my email by telling me they can't release any information like that unless I sign a non-disclosure agreement. Haha.

Also, I orginally had these two companies on my list:
http://www.datapacket.net
http://www.donhost.com
But then I did a search on webhostingtalk.com and discovered a LOT of negative threads about them both. Yikes. I emailed them both to see what they would say, but I never received any responses at all. Big surprise.

Here's the email I sent to each of these companies:

Hello, I am very interested in your windows reseller program. (I currently offer only linux hosting and want to get into the windows market.) However, I have a few questions to ask before I sign up. I appreciate your time, so thanks in advance for answering. I know it looks like a lot of questions, but they should be pretty easy to answer and not take much of your time.

1. How long have you been in the business of reselling windows hosting?

2. Are you incorporated, or or you a sole proprietorship?

3. Where are you based? (US, Australia, Canada, etc..)

4. How many full-time employees do you have? Part-time?

5. Do you only offer reseller packages, or do you also still offer shared/virtual hosting to non-resellers? (In other words, will I be competing against you for customers?)

6. Do you resell for someone else, or do you own/lease your own servers?

7. How many servers do you own/lease?

8. What data center(s) do you use?

9. Does your reseller pkg include my own nameservers? (ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com) How much extra is it for this
service?

10. Can I anonymously resell your reseller plan?

11. Can you provide at least 3 websites of people who are reselling your services?

12. Do you have a demo account so I can see the features of your reseller control panel?

Thanks again! I am really excited about signing up with you.. I just need to know this stuff so that I can make a more informed decision.

Cheers,



fasdf[/SIZE]

Here's another one that was just brought to my attention. I haven't done ANY research into them.. but they do offer the type of package I am looking for:

http://www.exa-bytes.com/reseller/windows2000_features.htm

Here's the reply from ExpertHost:

Hi Henri,
No problem at all, that's what were here to do:)
1. We have been in Windows NT hosting since 1997.
2. We are incorporated in the province of Ontario. Our main company is NJ
Tech Solutions Inc.
3. We are based in Canada. We have technical support centers in Canada,
U.S., Australia, and India. This makes our technical support REAL 24/7:)
4. We have 11 full time employees.
5. We are geared to reseller hosting. We offer anonymous dns or custom dns
so we are not competing against our resellers for non-reseller hosting.
Most of our client base is virtual reseller hosting.
6. We own our own servers. We are not a reseller.
7. At last count, I believe we owned over 150 servers.
8. We use multiple data centers in the U.S. (Worldcom)
9. custom name servers are $10US/month ($25US setup fee).
10.Yes, either with a custom name server or simply without (as we use an
anonymous dns that has no mention of ExpertHost)
11.No. We maintain the confidentiality of our resellers.
12. You can open a test account for 10 days at
http://www.experthost.com/testaccount

Henri, I hope you decide to come aboard with ExpertHost. These are very
exciting times in our company. We will soon be releasing our Hosting
control panels for resellers (Unix and Win2K) which will make the management
of your reseller domains quite simple. These are presently being beta
tested, and should be ready for release sometime in the spring.

Regards,
Atul
ExpertHost

The response from Cravis.com:
Mr. Straforelli,

Thank you for your interest in Cravis Hosting Services !

> 1. How long have you been in the business of reselling windows hosting?

Cravis.com operates since 7/2000

> 2. Are you incorporated, or or you a sole proprietorship?

Cravis.com is a subsidiary of VAG Ltd. (sole partnership)

> 3. Where are you based? (US, Australia, Canada, etc..)

Our company VAG Ltd. is registered and operates in Bulgaria.

> 4. How many full-time employees do you have? Part-time?

We are 8 full time, 3 of them are hosting support specialists.

> 5. Do you only offer reseller packages, or do you also still offer
shared/virtual hosting to non-resellers? (In other words, will I be
competing against you for customers?)

We are offering hosting to both resellers and non resellers. When working as
reseller, you are not competing against us for our customers, contrariwise,
you are our partner.

> 6. Do you resell for someone else, or do you own/lease your own servers?

We are not resellers. We are using our own dedicated servers.

> 7. How many servers do you own/lease?

Currently we are using 5 high end servers.

> 8. What data center(s) do you use?

Our servers are colocated in a Cable and Wireless datacenter in Orlando, FL.

> 9. Does your reseller 1 pkg include my own nameservers?
> (ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com) How much extra is it for this
> service?

Virtual nameservers are $7.5/nameserver/month or $15/month for both. If you
order CravisHostFour or CravisHostFive (monthly payment) nameservers are
free.


> 10. Can I anonymously resell your reseller 1 plan?

Yes. You can use our anonymous nameservers ns1.ourserver.net and
ns2.ourserver.net or your own nameservers.

> 11. Can you provide at least 3 websites of people who are reselling your
services? (The reseller 1 pkg)

www.sitation.com
www.vibecore.com
www.synthetic.com.au (Australia)
www.dio.gr (Grece)
www.patlis.com (Grece)
www.dreamzsolutions.net (India)


> 12. Do you have a demo account so I can see the features of your reseller
1 account before officially signing up?

We can create your account before ordering and you will be able to test our
service for one month for free.

If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
CRAVIS Sales

Response from adehost.com: :rolleyes:
Some of these questions will not be answered
due to the sensitive nature of the hosting
business.

the questions are

2, 4, 7, 8

These lines of question are never answered
in any form without an NDA. The NDA must be
enforceable within the USA to a citizen of the
USA ( residents aliens will not be accepted )

question # 11
please go to the forum and ask away
they will speak to you if they want to.
We do not give out our customers names
under any conditions.

PLease review your line of questions again
and resubmit.

When I signed up on adehost.com's forums, I posted a message for people to email me privately their thoughts.. here's one of the responses I received:
In response to your message in their forums - I was a customer of ADEhost for approximately 6-weeks. You can look through their forums, and it won't take much for you to see that anytime there is downtime, it is always someone else's fault. They have a real problem with accepting responsibility for their problems. This past week, for example, they couldn't decide if they were hacked, hit with a virus, or had a patch go bad (I still don't think they know). Last time there was network trouble because some other server in their NOC was 'hogging all the bandwidth' (which is also still not fixed). Three weeks ago, there were problems with FrontPage because of a 'bug' (which I personally had to prove to them was a setting they had misconfigured). Before that, there was an entire weekend of downtime because their NOC lost their network connection (interestingly, other hosts using the same NOC have not had any of these problems that they blame on the datacenter).

Stay away from these guys - they TRY, but have little clue when it comes to keeping their servers up. They also have a habit, as you suggested, of deleting posts in their forum that shows they screwed up. This last downtime, for example, was 'promised' on two different occasions to be completely resolved in 'no more than four hours'. Both of those posts have mysteriously disappeared from their forum. It's been over 5-days, and they still don't have everything working after the hack, virus attack, or failed installation - whatever they want to call it today.

They've also ignored many of their customers questions about how they will prevent these problems in the future (such as, if they run AntiVirus software on their servers, what sort of protection they have in place against hackers, etc..).

Hope this helps shed some light - yes, they do try, but no, they don't know what they're doing, and their attitude when it comes to crashes and downtime is less than professional.

...[name has been removed]

electric,

This has got to be the largest number of posts by one person in a row. I am not sure if this is ok with the forum rule, but I personally think this is appropriate.

I must also say, you have done a very thourogh job of researching, and I am sure you business will be a success. (If only the newbies in this forum would search like you...)

Thanks for sharing the information.

Peter

Here's the reply from Donhost.com when I asked them to comment about why webhostingtalk.com contains practically nothing bad bad comments about them, and if they have a demo account:
Hi,

We do not offer demo accounts, there is however a full 30 day money back guarantee.

There are mixed reviews of any hosting company of our size, webhostingtalk.com contains nothing but bad, however if you look at some of the other forums, the comments seem to be all good. Why this is, we have no idea.

Ultimately, try us out, if we're not right for you cancel and claim a refund, I am however sure that you will be delighted with our service.

Regards,

Donhost Support

In the above response from the guy who responded about adehost.com.. I emailed him back and asked if I could post his response on the forums.. here's what he wrote back:

Passing on them would be a good idea - especially if you're planning on reselling. You don't need your customers constantly complaining to you about their sites being down (or slow).

No, I am not still with them, and one of the reasons (aside from all their problems and their attitude) is I also plan to begin reselling soon (I'm a developer, and plan to add hosting to the services I offer my clients). The last thing I want to do is start losing my clients because this new service I'm offering doesn't work.

Sure, feel free to post my comments on WHT. I already have (a few times, in a thread in the resellers forum - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29350 - my first post was on the second page - my ID on WHT is 'cgrey'). You'll also see just how professional Asher from ADE is (his ID is ^kyo) in this thread, and how he is constantly contradicting himself and 'passing the buck'. Be prepared for the flames, he is very defensive, but it's easy to expose his incompetence and catch him in either a contradiction or an outright lie. If you do post my comments, please send me a link to the topic, and I'd happily step in and verify them.

Regards,

...[name has been removed]

1) I enjoy seeing these post because it tells me my weekness so thanks

2) Webhosting talk is a neutral ground so I value all postings here ( sorry to the company that thinks the WHT is bad )

also side note.
We don't delete the post on wht because that help us in the long run.

Asher does not Own ADEHOST any more. He is providing some support for me on the overnight's

purchase was done as of 12/26/01

Mike

Hi, Electric.
I'm also looking for windows based reseller hosting, and you your approach seems to be very effective.

SiteBySize offers pretty good plans.
I've exchanged few messages with them; they seem to be quite proffesional and they respond fast.
I've send them another email, where is used some of your questions, hopefully I'll get a reply from them soon.

Did you have any contact with them?

To be honest, I did visit their website and look at their reseller stuff (http://www.sitebysize.net/reseller.htm).

However, I couldn't easily figure out what they were offering. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure it out and then realized that there's no point. if their website is so hard to deal with, how is there service going to be?

Perhaps I was premature to make that assumption? My understanding is that basically you buy an account, and then (depending on the account you've purchased) you resell the included number of "Extra accounts".

So it isn't unlimited. But you can buy an account that has up to 10 "Extra accounts", and then it is $10 for each extra account you want to add.

Originally posted by electric
Here's another one that was just brought to my attention. I haven't done ANY research into them.. but they do offer the type of package I am looking for:

http://www.exa-bytes.com/reseller/windows2000_features.htm

Yes, exa-bytes and two other hosts offering Win 2000 reseller accounts with multiple domains:

http://www.sitebysize.net
http://www.aspcode.net

seem to offer identical server features, software, etc. This seems to suggest that they are resellers. Traceroute on sitebysize and aspcode seems to point to at least the same NOC.

I don't know. Does anyone know anything about them?

Below are the answers to the email that I've send them. Email is almost identical to Electric's



Hello, I am very interested in your windows reseller program. However, I was recommended to ask few questions before I sign up. I appreciate your time, so thanks in advance for answering. I know it looks like a lot of questions, but they should be pretty easy to answer and not take much of your time.



You are welcome to ask, this is very reasonable question.



1. How long have you been in the business of reselling windows hosting?



We started our business in late 1999. Before that our team work with one big Hosting company. We started with both Linux and Windows until we found our way 6 months after that. We are now professional Windows hosting.




2. Are you incorporated, or or you a sole proprietorship?



We are incorporated.




3. Where are you based? (US, Australia, Canada, etc..)



Our server located in downtown of Austin, Texas.



4. How many full-time employees do you have? Part-time?



We have 12 full-time employees, not mention about Part-time. There are a lot of Part-time employees in Internet business.



5. Do you resell for someone else, or do you own/lease your own servers?



We have our own servers.



6. How many servers do you own/lease?



19



7. What data center(s) do you use?



We use our own DC and buy B/W from On ramp who got it from VERIO.



8. Does your reseller pkg include my own nameservers? (ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com) How much extra is it for this service?



Yes, please review...

http://sitebysize.net/reseller.htm

http://sitebysize.net/resellerpackages.htm

http://sitebysize.net/resellerextra.htm




9. Can I anonymously resell your reseller plan?



Completely.



10. Can you provide at least 3 websites of people who are reselling your services?



I cannot tell you the name of our reseller since it is our policy that our reseller will be completely anonymous. This is some of our dedicated server customers, they are not reseller and it will be ok to tell you about...

http://www.missiontrek.com/, they are software provider and rent dedicated server for cartagio.net project. They develop their software on our server.

http://psychonline.com/, they are professors from California University and has many website on their server such cygen.com.




11. Do you have a demo account so I can see the features of your reseller control panel?

<confidential access info>




Thanks again! I am really excited about signing up with you.. I just need to know this stuff so that I can make a more informed decision.



You are welcome.

And the response from m6.net:Dear Henri,

Thank you for your email. We are more than happy to answer your questions.

1) M6.net began operating in 1997, since then we have grown to be a major
leader in the web hosting industry mainly due to our dedicated staff and our
clear focus on offering affordable Windows 2000 multiple domain accounts.

2) M6.net is a registered business unit of GloPro Network PTY Ltd.

3) Our NOC (Network Operations Center) is located in Huntsville, Alabama,
USA. Our head office is situated in Canberra, ACT, Australia.

4) We have 15 full time employees on staff.

5) We offer Multiple Domain accounts, which means that you can have a
multiple amount of web sites per hosting account. When signing up an
account with us you can choose if you want your account to be set up as a
reseller or not. Basically with a reseller account all the reseller
functions are incorporated into your control panel (e.g. adding resale
account, customizing your clients control panel - you can hide our identity,
viewing and responding to your clients support requests etc.

6) We own all our own servers.

7) We own 12 servers.

8) As above our data center is in Huntsville, AL, USA

9) If you want your own name servers we will have to set this up for you,
there is a charge of $50 to do this.

10) Yes you can anonymously resell our plans - you can hide our own identity
easily through your control panel.

11) I'm not sure what you mean by this however for our clients security we
do not give out the addresses of their web sites without their permission.

12) No we do not have a demo account - however you can take a look at our
control panel manual at http://control.m6.net/manual/manual.htm, this
describes all the features of our control panel including reselling.

For more information about reselling please go to
http://www.m6.net/resellers.asp.

If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me.

Regards,
Candice Humbley
M6.net - http://m6.net
Email - candiceh@glopro.com

The reply from exa-byte.com:Dear Henri,

Thank you for your great interest with our services. To answer your
enquiries:

1. How long have you been in the business of reselling windows hosting?
>>> 2.5 months for reselling Windows hosting. (1+ year for Red Hat Linux
hosting.)

2. Are you incorporated, or or you a sole proprietorship?
>>> Currently Sole Proprietorship. Our secretary firm is working on
incorporating our company to Private Limited Company.

3. Where are you based? (US, Australia, Canada, etc..)
>>> Company based at Georgetown, Malaysia.

4. How many full-time employees do you have? Part-time?
>>> 5 Full time employees. 1 Part-time.

5. Do you only offer reseller packages, or do you also still offer
shared/virtual hosting to non-resellers? (In other words, will I be
competing against you for customers?)
>>> We offer both packages.

6. Do you resell for someone else, or do you own/lease your own
servers?
>>> We lease our servers.

7. How many servers do you own/lease?
>>> 4

8. What data center(s) do you use?
>>> Red Hat Linux: VERIO, Colorado (Will move to VenturesOnline)
>>> Windows 2000: Onramp Access, Austin, TX

9. Does your reseller pkg include my own nameservers?
(ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com) How much extra is it for this
service?
>>> 1 pair of name servers at no cost!

10. Can I anonymously resell your reseller plan? (ie: I would sign up
other resellers.. But they wouldn't know YOU were actually the company
they were reselling for.. Make sense?)
>>> Yes, name servers, domain name, hosting controller all can be
private label.

11. Can you provide at least 3 websites of people who are reselling your
services?
>>> Nope, we need to protect our resellers privacy and anonymous.

12. Do you have a demo account so I can see the features of your
reseller control panel?
>>> Yes, please login from http://www.secure-trust.net/admin/
Login: [removed]
Pass: [removed]

If you have any enquiry please do not hesitate to contact. Thank you.


Best regards,

Exa-Bytes Team
---------------
Exa-Bytes Network
http://www.exa-bytes.com

...to further display the professionalism shown on the part of ADE host, the topic on their public forum that contained the messages that both 'electric' and I have posted here (concerning their downtime, competence, and responsiveness) has now been completely delted off of their forums (by Asher, the same person who says earlier in this topic that they never delete any posts).

Since Asher will probably try to tell you it never existed, you can see it here, first in it's original form (before any deletion), and second, after some individual posts were edited/deleted.

The entire thread has now mysteriously 'vanished'....

www.leagra.com/ade-before.htm
www.leagra.com/ade-after.htm

Originally posted by cgrey
. . . . . . The entire thread has now mysteriously 'vanished'....Would have been the best thing to do in the first place instead of just editing all those posts.

Wow, charlie has a lot of free time on his hands.
I'll add here. Why i deleted that post, because it grew way out of control and I couldnt contian my temper any more by looking at your ridiculious replies.

...except it was the same person who has stated publically many times that he NEVER deletes ANY post for any reason.

The whole point of this thread that was deleted was to show the level of professionalism (or lack thereof) on his part.

This is just one of many examples that he's said one thing, and done another. Usually, he just claims that it never happened, this time, there's evidence to show him contradicting himself, which may be important to anyone considering doing business with him or the company he represents.

Originally posted by cgrey
This is just one of many examples that he's said one thing, and done another. Usually, he just claims that it never happened, this time, there's evidence to show him contradicting himself, which may be important to anyone considering doing business with him or the company he represents.

things change, GET OVER IT. lastly i do not represent adehost. I work for adebill, over there we have each and every satisfied person. ill gladly send you their email addresses (with their permission ofcourse) and you can ask them about how i handle that business.

You should honestly GET A LIFE and stop posting untruths about me.

if you don't represent ADEhost, should you be deleting threads off their message boards??

According to Michael (who says he's the new owner), you still do support work for adeHost. That would mean you represent them if you work for them..

I'm still a forum moderator and will continue to remain that way. So i can delete posts, ban users PERIOD.

I only handle back end support for adehost and that is temporary, therefore I'm not representing them.

And yes mike IS the owner of adehost.

By the way you really seem to enjoy bashing my reputation and implying that i dont know jacksh**. Whats up with that? Are you really that bored that you have to go around on each message board you find and start posting nonsense about adehost or me? :eek:

NOTHING that I have posted is untrue.

What I have done is document the downtime I experienced while your customer (which ALL of your other Win2K customers experienced when the server crashed), and your attempts to repair it.

Was your Win2K box not down because of a patch that went bad last week (on January 4th, I believe)?

Did you not initially diagnose the problem as a virus (and post a home page on all your customers' sites saying it is a virus that is being 'cleaned)?

Are all the services on that server (such as FrontPage and the control panel) fixed YET?

Was your MS-SQL server not down for a week last month?

Was your network performance not affected by servers in your NOC 'hogging all your bandwidth)?

Is THAT fixed yet? (Be careful how you answer, YOU posted a message in your forum asking people to run a speed test, and the responses you got were still showing excessively slow speeds) - I can give you a link to the thread if you want to delete it.

Do you take responsibility for ANY of this, or were they all someone else's fault?

These are the things I experienced, and these are the things I reported. I also told the person who asked (publically, and others privately), that you would get defensive. Was I wrong about that?

Then, after being called on all of these things in your own forums, you deleted all evidence of them.

1. Yes, but can you blame adehost for it? The person who advised us to install the patch claimed that he hosts many sites on his 'server'. But it went bad night after the tech people installed it.

2. No one 'diagnosed' it as a virus, because it WASNT one. Mike made a mistake so did Isaacs.

3. YES IT IS, FRONTPAGE NOW HAS AUTORIZATION THANKS TO A PATCH WHICH HOSTINGCONTROLLER SEND US AFTER A HUNDRED MAILS I SENT TO THEM.

4. Only 4.5 days, we mailed Microsoft 100's of times but they said that they've never faced this problem before. Then i experimented a little and found a workaround MYSELF after recreating the entire server on an empty box we had.

5. Yes it is and it STILL is, atleast until the end of January when the new NOC is completed. And yes our speed is *SLIGHTLY* better after we ugpraded that troublesome win2k server to max. But can you blame ADEHost directly for this? We chose the NOC when it was performing excellent, HOW WERE WE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT IT WOULD DO THIS? AFTERALL WE DO NOT OWN THE NOC.

6. For the JRUN patch, I was still in control yes I assume responsiblity for that. We should'nt have taken the word of that person and I should've personally ensured that it was tested first. But that person was persistent and was complaining he wanted JSP.

7. I will ofcourse be defensive about a firm which I built from scratch into the fine firm it is today. Wont you? Or will you just sit by when a person comes out of the woodwork and starts bitching?

8. I deleted them because those posts are no longer required as all issues with the exception of one (I think) are resolved. Point made.

Good day, Sincerely,
Asher.

By the way, you really cant complain about our Linux hosting. We have most linux clients and only a few windows 2000 clients. Because anyone who's wise normally goes with Linux (at least on shared hosting due to stability). We've only had one linux downtime so far and that was when verio's router to the NOC went kaput, can you blame us for that? Infact we found out the exact reason by ringing up verio while our NOC werent responding due to the outage.

I didn't have a Linix plan with you - I had a Win2K plan.

I therefore can not speak from personal experience when asked, and frankly, could care less about what dowtime your Linux server may or may not have had. I'm sure your Linux customers may very well be happy customers. But, that doesn't erase all the problems I had with your Win2K servers, does it?

Sure it doesnt but it does show that I or the rest of the people at adehost arent as incompetitent as you think. FYI - ade manages A LOT of linux servers and has done this very well. ade also provides managed hosting (linux/win2k) to corporate customers and has done this without any complaints/problems. unfortunately ade had a little bad luck on its road to shared win2k hosting, but all that has been 'nearly' resolved, once the new server system that ade has come up with becomes effective in a while the clients will see the performance for themselves.

aside from the slow servers and little downtime ade has excellent customer support and answers questions within 15 minutes usually (24/7/365 366 on leap years :)). how much more can you expect? people paying $5 a month get the same excellent support as people paying $800 month.

good day, sincerely,
asher.

Originally posted by ^Kyo
By the way, you really cant complain about our Linux hosting. We have most linux clients and only a few windows 2000 clients. Because anyone who's wise normally goes with Linux (at least on shared hosting due to stability). We've only had one linux downtime so far and that was when verio's router to the NOC went kaput, can you blame us for that? Infact we found out the exact reason by ringing up verio while our NOC werent responding due to the outage. I've been an interested spectator in this thread, but have to admit, even I am becoming confused. :confused:
Is ADEhost owned by you; or not?

No its not anymore. I use 'we' because im sorta used to it :)
I'm still working as a support agent though.

Originally posted by ^Kyo
No its not anymore. I use 'we' because im sorta used to it :)
I'm still working as a support agent though. Even I can understand that. :D

hehe :D :D :D :D
glad to see this thread is over ;)

thanks for the info cgrey

and to electric, thanks for opening this informative thread

Originally posted by ^Kyo
By the way you really seem to enjoy bashing my reputation and implying that i dont know jacksh**. Whats up with that? Are you really that bored that you have to go around on each message board you find and start posting nonsense about adehost or me? :eek:

Sorry, but you have destroyed your own reputation. Anyone who reads this thread will plainly see that you did not tell the truth about deleting threads in your own forums.

So why don't you quit while you still have even a tiny bit of dignity and just go away and take a business course. Maybe one titled, "How to act like a professional business."

Good grief.. I'll bet you reply to this. You know why? Because you're a 14 year old kid who can't stand to let someone else have the last word.

The truth hurts and I am sure glad I didn't pick you to host my business with. Yikes!

Here's the response from www.vibus.net: (It's a little hard to read, but the answers are immediately following each question.)

Hello, I am very interested in your windows reseller program. (I
currently offer only linux hosting and want to get into the windows
market.) However, I have a few questions to ask before I sign up. I
appreciate your time, so thanks in advance for answering. I know it
looks like a lot of questions, but they should be pretty easy to answer
and not take much of your time.

1. How long have you been in the business of reselling windows hosting? We
operate our own NOC here in the UK, we've been reselling packages for about
18 months now

2. Are you incorporated, or or you a sole proprietorship? We are a limited
company

3. Where are you based? (US, Australia, Canada, etc..) UK

4. How many full-time employees do you have? Part-time? 4 full time
employees

5. Do you only offer reseller packages, or do you also still offer
shared/virtual hosting to non-resellers? (In other words, will I be
competing against you for customers?) We offer reseller packages,
co-location servers and dedicated servers, so no, you wont be competing
against us!

6. Do you resell for someone else, or do you own/lease your own
servers? We own all our servers

7. How many servers do you own/lease? Currently 56

8. What data center(s) do you use? We have our own datacentre

9. Does your reseller pkg include my own nameservers?
(ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com) How much extra is it for this
service? No, currently personal DNS ( including a domain name ) is £ 100 /
year + VAT

10. Can I anonymously resell your reseller plan? yes

11. Can you provide at least 3 websites of people who are reselling your
services? Unfortunately not, we cant give out that information, you can of
course run some traces and pings on some of our IP's to test speed et al.
80.94.192.24

12. Do you have a demo account so I can see the features of your
reseller control panel? Yes, certainly,
http://212.69.234.224/admin/default.asp username / password : testing
Thanks again! I am really excited about signing up with you.. I just
need to know this stuff so that I can make a more informed decision.

Lol, you don't need to pretend ;) add the research to your list on WHT ;)

Cheers,

just a note to close off on:

^Kyo = Asher, he is the old owner. He is not me. I on the other hand have enjoyed this thread. Good to see this sort of action. shows me the weekness.

electric : thank you for posting the other firms information. I have found it most useful. so have other's

cgrey : you are an ex-client, sorry to see that you and asher have bad blood. best of luck. side note: I told asher to repost your messages back on our forum. He was not authorised to remove them. I also told asher that he had to take it somewhere else. I don't think a pissing contest is professional.

thank you,

Mike

To be honest,

If I see that thread back on your forums, I will again consider your company as part of my possible list of companies to choose from.

Mike, you have never lied or been unprofessional to me in any way. I appreciate your willingness to come back here and post.

As the owner of adehost.com, you have the ability to turn the company around and make it a well respected place. This seems to be your intention.

Cheers!

<<Admin edit : removed - off-topic>>

Originally posted by electric
To be honest,

If I see that thread back on your forums, I will again consider your company as part of my possible list of companies to choose from.

Mike, you have never lied or been unprofessional to me in any way. I appreciate your willingness to come back here and post.

As the owner of adehost.com, you have the ability to turn the company around and make it a well respected place. This seems to be your intention.

Cheers!
well it's like this electric,

I've owned many other business ( still own a few ), the hosting industry is very wide open. So wide that the basic questions you asked are of such value ( due to the replies ) that I did not fight this thread at all.

I would have stated that you should not have posted publicly those comments from other host. But business is business, and those companies are now on my list of review and the information printed and stored.

infact one of those companies has something that I needed to learn about and now I have it. I should give you 1 month for free just for that.

Also I told asher to repost the fight, I could care less that they have a dispute but what I'm bothered with is the time frame is not mentioned. I bought the company late December. I wish that the dispute would have a time frame to show before and after. But that will never happen, I have no Idea, nor the right to ask the other party to modify their post to show respective time frame.

well good hunting and best of luck

mike

Thanks Mike.

I'm confident that you can turn adehost.com around and make it into a great company. There are some bad posts in here about them, but if you continue to affect change in a good way, then the number of good posts will soon outway the bad.

You'll be interested to know that almost every company I posted also sent me a personal message thanking me for posting the comments from other companies. It seems you aren't the only one who is interested in the responses of your competition.

Cheers!

I'd be happy to post the time frame, Mike, if it will help clear some things up. I sort of already did in my post earlier in this thread.

Prior to 12/26 (the date you 'took over'):

There was about 6-hours downtime in early December. That was the time when everyone from ADEhost disappeared when a bunch of clients were looking for answers in the forums and through the ticket system.

Performance problems began soon after this downtime was resolved. They still exist to this day, and yes, you have told your clients it will be resolved this month (January)

The SQL server was down for almost 5 days beginning on December 17th.


Since 12/26:

About 4-hours downtime on 12/29 (reported as a Verio Network outage) - and yes, I did complain about this on your forum, because whether you know it or not, your home page claims that you have 'multiple, redundant connections with multiple providers, and backup T1 and DS2 lines in case of emergency. Why I complained about then, and was 'attacked' for it as usual, was that if you had this redundancy, and multiple providers, why did EVERYTHING go down when one network died - where was the redundancy?

The Win2k box was down again on 1/2 - intially reported as a virus (and a page was put on your customer's pages saying a new virus hit, and was being cleaned up). Later, it was reported that it wasn't a virus, but rather that the box was hacked. Finally, the problem was once and for all determined to be a patch gone bad. As of yesterday, there were still remnants of this problem, with the Admin panel and FrontPage extensions not working on at least some of your client's sites. Asher posted this morning that everything has been restored. I have not seen another post to confirm or deny this from any of your customers in your forums.

Finally, today, at least 5-6 threads were deleted from your forums. Initially, I thought it was only the one thread that Asher and I were 'battling' in this morning, but after further investigation, there are other threads (some of which I didn't even participate in) that mostly contained complaints from your other clients that things were still not working after many days, or that no replies to their inquiries were received. One in particular was originally titled "16+ hours of downtime and counting..." in which I personally did not participate, but was a pretty active thread (something like 20 responses) in which a number of people were posting complaints about the downtime, and ade's lack of response. This thread was started somewhere around the time of the errant patch (on 1/2/02). I'm curious if you know THIS thread was also deleted - as I remember, you were an active participant in it.

Whatever the case may be, I remain a former customer, and I will continue to report my experience to anyone when solicited (which brings us full circle to how this thread started). That experience will now also include an account of your representative's handling of THIS situation, with links to this thread in WHT, and the deleted posts on your forums.

Just so you know (and I think you can see this as you look back through this thread and the ones that were deleted) - I did not start this thread, nor did I come to WHT or to your forums and start an 'ADEhost sucks' topic - I did not choose to get publicly involved until Asher responded on YOUR forum to the original poster with a personal PUBLIC attack against me because I complained that I wasn't happy with the service I got at ADE, and felt that the issues weren't being handled professionally (and yes, I did use the word incompetent - that's my opinion, and I'm entitled to it). When asked, I will certainly give my honest account of my experiences, but contrary to Asher's belief, I am NOT running around looking for chances to attack adeHost, or posting my experience unsolicited, nor am I in ANY way making up, or embelishing any of the experiences I had. You can check your own forums, all the forums here and on any other hosting-related site, and you will not find ONE thread that I started just for the sake of 'bashing' adeHost. I would have not even gotten involved PUBLICLY here, or on your forums, had I not been provoked. THIS is what has been a problem with Asher all along.

Having said all this - good luck to you in turning your company around. Let's hope some of your current and/or former employees haven't tarnished your reputation beyond repair.

...Charlie

Originally posted by electric
To be honest,

If I see that thread back on your forums, I will again consider your company as part of my possible list of companies to choose from.
Glad you may consider them still...as for me, they've been permanently crossed off my shrinking list of potential W2k vendors, thanks in large part to the apparent lack of concern for prospective consumers, as denoted by various unprofessional posts in these forums. Yet another webhosting vendor that may provide a decent product, but can't back it up with professionalism (yes, that is a MUST in this industry!).

Thank you for your continued efforts in seeking out the "perfect" W2k vendor, Electric! I will continue to observe your research and look forward to hearing your final decision, as I know it will be a well thought-out one that I will likely agree with.

Keep up the great work! :)

Originally posted by electric
To be honest, I did visit their website and look at their reseller stuff

However, I couldn't easily figure out what they were offering. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure it out and then realized that there's no point. if their website is so hard to deal with, how is there service going to be?


Sometimes ago I told them that after 10 minutes of reading their reseller offers I did not understand what do they offer. But now I seem to understand. (it looks like a programming algorithm :) )

But my main question is that how are you going to understand which one has better support, uptime, server load etc.

Have you decided on them (or ranked them ?)

Mac

To put some closure on my posts concerning adeHost...

I was contacted privately, in a professional manner by Mike. We had a conversation that leads me to believe he is truly interested in changing the opinions that may have been formed during the time prior to his taking over the company.

While none of this changes anything that I've experienced in the past, my issues were never so much about the downtime (few hosts don't experience any problems at all), but more about the reaction to, and handling of, their customers inquiries (and yes, even complaints) about the downtime and problems we all experienced (specifically as those actions relate to one individual in particular).

I want it to be known, that I was no longer a customer of adeHost when Mike took over, and therefore, none of my comments in this thread or others on adeHost's forums pertain to him directly. The one exchange that we have had was as friendly and professional as I would expect to be treated as a customer.

I WILL still report my experience with adeHost if and when I'm asked, and I also will mention that there has been a change of ownership since the time I was a client.

I hope this helps put this thread to bed.

...Charlie

electric,
This is rather off-topic, but I would like to complement you on your research.

I am also impressed by you personally. Seeing that you are a newbie to this forum, and comparing you to other newbies, who seems to enjoy posting repetitive topics and stupid questions, you actually went through the pain of researching, and also post your result to share with others.

Thank you,

Peter

Thanks for the compliament.

Someone posted above and asked:
But my main question is that how are you going to understand which one has better support, uptime, server load etc.

To be honest, the support issue can be mostly determined by how fast and accurate a response is received to your questions. If you email a set of realistic questions to a potential company and they ignore you.. then chances are they will also ignore your requests for support if you were their customer.

Uptime can be determined by looking at post posts in these threads and threads on the forum of the company your are researching.. if they have one. Otherwise, you could try setting a "monitoring" service on their website for a while.. (which I have done.) You can also ask for references and then correspond with them directly, as well as monitoring THEIR websites, too.

Server load... only thing there is to talk with references. Not much you can do but hope for the best once you've made a decision.

In short.. there is no quick way to discover the "perfect" reseller. But there is a way to limit your "best guess" to a few possible choices.

I intend to share my final decisions with the folks in the mchost.com reseller only section, because they are a community that I care about and want to help. Posting my final decisions on these forums here (webhostingtalk.com) would do nothing for any of you, except cause some to not bother with their own research.

After glancing through the long thread this has become.. there is enough information here to teach ANYONE how to do their own research and due dillegence. Buyer beware.

Cheers!

Originally posted by ADEhost
...

Good to see this sort of action. shows me the weekness.

....
thank you,

Mike

Hi

I noticed twice you spelled weekness.... :D heheh
Sorry I can't help it... I'm a spelling freak ;)

Unfortunately, however much research one does, and I am a strong believer in research, it still comes down to trying a host and seeing what your personal experience is. I remember those days before I opened and purchased my own hosting companies-those days when I was like any other reseller.

I researched, checking all forums available at the time, and selected host #1. This host had good ratings and was one of the only ones to provide support to your customer, which as a newbie I found desirable. And, for a while, service was great. But apparently, others were moving rapidly to them as well. They began having problems which they mostly blamed on their colocated NOC. Then they moved into their own and the problems continued. After months (gave them many chances), I decided to make a change. By the way, this particular host probably gets the widest range of positive and negative comments on this forum today.

So, on to host #2, who also provided service to the resellers customers. Here, I selected a virtual plan. However, this host was never able to solve initial email problems and after 3 weeks of efforts and numerous emails and calls, I had to change again. This host still gets overall positive reviews from most, but some negative.

I now decided to ignore price, go to the best. I chose the host that at the time was almost universally rated the best-host #3. In less than 30 days, I found more problems here than anywhere before. Turns out I was on the leading edge of their downfall. They have since been purchased and the consolidated company is rated very poorly. They were unable during my time there to even set up accounts correctly-some taking as long as two weeks.

Again I researched and found one highly rated and one with little information. I chose to split my business and try both. Host #4 and Host #5 both turned out to be great and I stuck with them until I purchase my own servers and opened my own independent hosting company. Host #4 is an Alabanza host and I know little about their response to trouble tickets because in 18 months I only ever had to send one. Uptime was 99.97% during my time there. Ping time 60-80 ms. If anyone insists on an Alabanza control panel, I still resell for this host. Since I rated them so high, I will disclose Host #4 is successfulhosting.com. Host #5 was virtually unheard of, but I hosted hundreds of accounts with them over a period of time and still host some Cobalt with them. They are Host2own.com/cari.net. Their response to tickets was incredible, account setup quick and, as an example, when I installed my first Miva Merchant account, I sent a trouble ticket with questions, they suggested I call them for ease. I did, got through instantly, and they spent about an hour walking me through every step. Way beyond the call of duty. Oh, uptime with them 99.99%. Ping time typically under 40ms.

So, there are good hosts. Maybe the best approach is to set up a few accounts of your own first, let them prove themselves, then be happy. No host will be perfect, but there are many very good ones-a few less unfortunately in the Windows environment. Good luck, Electric, in your decision.

Electric

What results did you reach. which one did you go finally?

Can I ask your opinion about exa-bytes.com and sitebysize.com?


Mac

Originally posted by muppie


Hi

I noticed twice you spelled weekness.... :D heheh
Sorry I can't help it... I'm a spelling freak ;)

that is my weakness, I can not spell since I was a kid. I suffer for it alot, but I've turned it to my advantage.

what do I do

I keep my word. try not to write to much, because your committed to what you write. and people value a persons actions more than the skills of the writing.

simple as pie I say.

till we meet again I bid you peace,

Mike from adehost

My company ADEhost.com

p.s. thank you for the correction. It does not hurt one bit.

Hi,

My name is Suracha S., CEO of ITITEM ltd. We are the owner of sitebysize.com, sitebysize.net and other 20 web sites I do not want to mention about.

The present of personal message happened here make me worry and it appears that our baby, sitebysize was focused by many people. Since many people here talking about sitebysize, I would like to do the same.

Some information do not provide on their web site.

Sitebysize''s strong point is Tech. Support''s knowledge. Every of them have good programming and Database Administration skill. Apart from Windows Server knowledge, they specialist in cross-platform applications and have strong experiences on Linux to Windows processes. Many of their resellers decide to move all customers from Linux to Windows server after few months they stay with them.

Sitebysize offer full services as list on web site but that is not their full goal. The enhanced features will be added to their service as standard to all new and existed account, this will be started on February. These enhanced features will be announced almost every month until the end of the year. These were included mirror disk on all Virtual Servers, daily backup, second NOC in Houston, third in Thailand and forth in Taiwan or Singapore. Many of these cannot list here due to marketing strategies. What I can say is that the brand new revolutionary packages and services will be announced from time to time.

Regards,
Suracha S.
________________________________________________
CEO
ITITEM ltd.

I have been researching for months for best and most profitable reseller package.
<this message was meant to be in another thread>
I will appreciate if the admin could delete this message. thanks

Originally posted by hsent2u
I have been researching for months for best and most profitable reseller package.
<this message was meant to be in another thread>
I will appreciate if the admin could delete this message. thanks

Well IMHO there's nothing wrong for Itetim to post in here. His compnay is discussed in this thread and a few explanations were asked...Its fine for him to post in and introduce himself here..

I wanted to reconsider adehost windows reseller accounts so I visited "adehost.com".

I was so impressed with the results that I wanted to share my experience.


Welcome to adehost.com
Your account has been created.
You can access your Web site right away using d1048.u23.adehost.com. Over the next few days, DNS servers all across the Internet will
update themselves with your new site name. Once that happens, you will be able to access your site at its permanent address, adehost.com.


This is H-Sphere default page.

And I'm sure that they lost a customer for ever.

Mac

Hey mac,
Just so you know, you caught me fair and square while we are updaing our site. Sad thing is. I'm installing H-sphere. SO I had to stop taking signups. I can not afford to have the problems that will be happening and handle the new accounts ( it's difficult the h-sphere has a high learning curve but so far it's worth it )

So yes you got a bad screen. the install of h-sphere is not easy. and we just started the changes.

Interestingly enough that you pointed out that they finished there new install I was hoping to keep that under raps for a while so you spoiled my new comming out party. :(

thank you,

Mike

Since you're still hanging around here, Michael...

Do you have any explanation as to why Asher never un-deleted all those posts in your forums that you supposedly told him to (see above in this thread), and why despite your efforts here to distance yourself from him he is still playing a very prominent role in your support?

I'm always here. I've never left. won't leave for a while.

in reference to missing post :

I asked him to replace all those missing post. from what I looked at the 16+ hour post was replaced and there was no longer a problem. If there was others, I really did not see them, but the point of the mater was that 16+ post ( which I felt was the most important ) was up and that was a huge problem, it was resolve without incident.

in reference to why is he around :

asher still helps me out alot, he is there to help me. and also to help others. I plan to have him arround for at least 6 months on the payroll maybe even longer.

He's no longer involved in the day to day and he basically solves the problems durring the night hours, so that helps me get a good night sleep.

so I've taken the trade off, I got somebody to help me with the 12am to 9 am hours (est) and he does a good job. therefor It leaves me better off in the short term and maybe for long term. Also he's going to be a good help on the transistion to the new servers.

thank you for your concern,

Mike