Hi guys,

I have been a reseller myself for splashhost and have been very satisfied until recently, and I have also seen the posts of other resellers regarding their positive and negative experiences...

I am of the opinion that reselling companies oversell their space and bandwidth as much as shared hosting providers do [I am after all just a fool and I could be terribly wrong in this].

Now there is a fundamental difference between overselling to individual sites and overselling to bulk-space-buyers [resellers who can host as many domains as they want]. A single site to occupy all its quota is much less likely than a reseller using it up.

I am wondering if many of the problems that resellers face in terms of server load and progressively slow loading is because of oversell to resellers

I would like to hear other reseller's opinions of this - and also is a reselling provider obliged to disclose the number of resellers sharing a server

[If I am asked in a similar vein if a shared hosting cutomer wants to know the number of sites sharing his server, I would say yes]

I mean should resellers make it mandatory for the host to disclose the number of resellers sharing their server?

Cheers
Balaji

Yes, i would think all hosts that offer prices like that oversell (bigtime). I am with a number of different hosts right now, and form my experience, they pack LOADs of clients on the server... and once Apache starts crashing every 2 days cuz of the server load, they kick a few clients onto the next server.


I need a dedicated! :(

Balaji, I think you are right, but the number of resellers on a single server is useless - one reseller will grow from 1 to 50 clients in a month and another will make only 5 clients in the same time...

Walter,

I see what you mean... but the number and the plan they are on [like 5 x 2gb and 5 x 1gb] would give us a fair good idea of the way the server is used...

And the host can put up a ToS that any reseller going above his quota will have to pay hefty fees or something [so they in turn dont oversell]

In short, some norms and transparency is in order

Thanks
Balaji

Okay, here's an idea....

if you're reseller account allows 2GB and you only need 50MB, still allocate 2GB to your account. Now let's say you get 1 customer who needs 100MB, then shrink your account by that 100MB. Now why would you do that? As far as I know, if you allocate 2GB for your account, then that cannot be oversold to another account. Get it? I hope I'm making sense, but for your canadians out there, I've had a moosehead too many :)

Originally posted by MotleyFool
And the host can put up a ToS that any reseller going above his quota will have to pay hefty fees or something [so they in turn dont oversell]

Maybe they won't get any new business :)

Hi MotleyFool,

This is just my thoughts...

Many hosts don't want to tell the exact numbers of reseller accounts in a box... including my host :(

Anyway, I can understand but recently I am quite happy with my host that if any problem occur due to the server load etc... my host will try to explain the situation to me. My host did transfer some resellers to other servers as we all understand that initially those new resellers will soon have their clients to share the server resources etc. besides those "old" resellers on the same box. In short, my host will move those resource intense account out of the box in order to help to save the server resources and load.

Although I have some bad experiences together with my host during "our move" from his old provider to current NOC. I have also experienced server hardware and software problems besides the router issues at NOC from the past. This experience has caused some negative impacts on my new startup web hosting business but those problems can be forgiven as it is out of my host's control.

In short, as long as the host know and plan ahead of what should be done before crashing of server occur... such as moving those resource intense account out of the box... at least to me my host is doing his best to provide his services and both of us will benefit in the sense of when the "growth of resellers", the host know how to handle this situation. You can't find a provider/host that only put one reseller account in a box with the price that I am paying... if I am the host, I will put as many as I can but will monitor and see whether will I need to get a new box and transfer those growing reseller to a new box in order to allow both parties to expand.

I hope my english isn't that bad... hope you can understand what I am trying to share in terms of my thoughts ;)

Anyway... the Chinese New Year is around the corner so I would like to wish everyone...

HAPPY HORSE YEAR!!!

Cheers!

Kindest regards,
Choon

Its a shame we have to guess what the "average" customer will really use. In a perfect world, we would charge by the MB/GB/Emails/MySQL's etc. and one would pay for what they actually used. However, that isn't possible in this world for two reasons:

1-We have to get paid before the service is used. Otherwise, we would go broke from those who didn't pay.

2-The industry does it and if you introduced charges by actual usage, everyone would think by comparison you were outrageous.

I just looked at a server (not mine) today where the host is fitting everything within 50 GB of Bandwidth although he has actually sold well over 500 GB. Under 10% utilization.