Hey all,
Last year, I got hooked up with the Fashosts reseller program, which I used to sell web space to my clients.

At the time, the price was unbeatable. But now, as my contract is about to expire, I've been looking into other reseller plans.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing a big difference by and large as to how reseller plans are handled within the UK vs. the way they are in the US.

For example,
With two exceptions I can think of, hosting companies here in the US usually charge resellers by the users you bring, while hosting companies in the UK like

Aceinternet
Donhost
Fashosts
and others

charge by the reseller account.

It seems that biggest impact that this model is that it is A LOT cheaper to buy reseller hosting from these companies.

Now,
Economically speaking, the pound has always been stronger than the dollar (well as far as I can remember anyway). And after a quick lesson in economics from spending some time abroad, I generally assume that things get more expensive the more valuable your currency is.

I'm sure there are other factors to consider, but based on what I know about the UK (very little), wouldn't it be logical to assume that reseller hosting should be more expensive, overall?

The only thing I can think of is that their data centers either have to be much larger, or their overall operating costs need to be much smaller.

Am I way off base?

One questoin, how long have you been with FatHost *cough* I mean FastHosts?

UK bandwith, please correct me if I am wrong, it is more expensive over there than here in the good ol US of A.

But do a search in here for "donhost" "fasthost" and believe me they don't sound realiable hosters that should even be in buisness, they seem to have bad buisness practices.

Yes they are cheaper, but the consequences they leave you aren't cheap.

Originally posted by sam.moses
Hey all,
Last year, I got hooked up with the Fashosts reseller program, which I used to sell web space to my clients.

At the time, the price was unbeatable. But now, as my contract is about to expire, I've been looking into other reseller plans.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing a big difference by and large as to how reseller plans are handled within the UK vs. the way they are in the US.

For example,
With two exceptions I can think of, hosting companies here in the US usually charge resellers by the users you bring, while hosting companies in the UK like

Aceinternet
Donhost
Fashosts
and others

charge by the reseller account.

It seems that biggest impact that this model is that it is A LOT cheaper to buy reseller hosting from these companies.

Now,
Economically speaking, the pound has always been stronger than the dollar (well as far as I can remember anyway). And after a quick lesson in economics from spending some time abroad, I generally assume that things get more expensive the more valuable your currency is.

I'm sure there are other factors to consider, but based on what I know about the UK (very little), wouldn't it be logical to assume that reseller hosting should be more expensive, overall?

The only thing I can think of is that their data centers either have to be much larger, or their overall operating costs need to be much smaller.

Am I way off base?

Generally hosting in the US seems to be a little cheaper, so I'm not sure which companies you have been looking at!.

FastHosts charge £50 per month, which = ~$70 USD. Plenty of companies that frequent this board provide reseller plans similar to FastHosts, but with much better support, and don't make fraudlent claims of unlimited bandwidth etc. - try searching the special offers forums for details.

Good luck,
Matt

The Pound has not been stronger than the dollar since 1998. In fact, over the last 13 months the rate has dropped from 1.4938 to 1.4175.

Now, as to the rest of the assumptions you make:

On the whole, I find just as many cheap hosts in the U. S. as the U. K. and they are generally just as bad. And, there are hosts in the U. S. who charge by the reseller account as well.

Promise me you will do a search on "Donhost" before using them ... There are a few interesting threads!!

Cheers

Chris

You might be interested in:

http://www.mchost.com/
http://www.voxtreme.com/
http://www.splashhost.com/

Tuche.
After some more research, it seems that there are some better deals out there. Never really planned on using donhost. They don't support ODBC. Which makes it quite impossible for me to host there.

Thanks

sam.moses were you happy with fasthost services since some people said they're bad but most are lying!

Honestly,
It wasn't all that bad.
There was an outage last march that lasted for two weeks, and their support staff was mediocre at best, but the fact is that I'm kind of used to being real patient with hosting companies. Their service is okay. Not great, but okay. I noticed that their servers reboot at least twice a day, which does get kind of annoying, and they hold you to your bandwidth limitations.

Before that though,
I had been on an account with Datapipe, and I was routing all of my domains though Zone Edit because their supposedly certified microsoft experts knew more about sports, than actually getting anything done. Datapipe is the worst... the Absolute worst experience I've ever had with a hosting company. I've heard a lot of people complain about fasthosts, but immediately after datapipe, it was like a walk in the park. Would I go with them again? No. I'm looking into hosting with Adehost, who really seem to know what they are doing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Outage 2 weeks...mediocre support staff...2 reboots per day....and he says "not that bad". What a kind, patient gentleman.

Yes,
and I can bring in a lot of business too.
If I had more free time and advertising money, I could bring in fifteen accounts a month, as apposed to the fifteen sites I worked with last year in my spare time.

My thought on the subject is that it would be great if things were perfect. Really. But there are a million hosting companies out there, and to be perfectly frank, very few of them know what they are doing. I'm to a point where if things work perfectly 90% of the time, I'm a happy guy.

Expecting perfection in web hosting is like expecting perfection in life. Ain't gonna happen. But if things work the majority of the time, what more can you expect? Only real gripe I had with fasthosts was thier support. It could have been better.

Originally posted by sam.moses
Yes,
and I can bring in a lot of business too.
If I had more free time and advertising money, I could bring in fifteen accounts a month, as apposed to the fifteen sites I worked with last year in my spare time.

From my personal view,
An Account is worth more than the domain.
why?
The resources used by the account cover the following
as a one time resource usage:
Domain management,
Domain accounting
and domain setup.

thereafter there is no training.
the account if the have multiple domains will genererate the following revenue streams of overage or purchase of bigger packages:
Bandwdith useage
web drive space usage
email drive space usage
Databases drive space usage


to me there is no downside
to the accounts ( the again I don't oversell my system so I'm protected from certain risks )

Mike

God this was a stupid post. Sorry for wasting your time with the initial posting. Someone needs to remind me not to post when I haven't slept for a week. lol.


Anyway,
in response to ADEhost...
It depends on who you ask.

Obviously, if you ask a web host what the most important service in a web site is, they will tell you hosting. If you ask an end user, they will tell you that the most important feature is usability, if you ask a system administrator, they will tell you reliability. If you ask any of my current clientel, and they will tell you that they just want web applications and web sites that are easy to use, that do cool stuff.

I just want it all to work.
:(
Cheers.

I kinda know what u mean about the price over here being cheaper than the USA for reseller accounts.
However i saw something interesting the other day, i bought internetworks magazine which came with a guide to webhosting and it has donhost and fasthosts both listed as top uk companies !!!!!!!!! may i ask what got into the publishers of that magazine lol

To reiterate my above post, hosting is cheaper in the US. A number of economic factors facilitate this; maybe people don't know where to look if they find prices are higher.

It's obvious why Internet Magazine rated Donhost and Fasthosts - they get paid to do so. It all boils down to advertising.

From what I hear is that you don't get crappy bandwidth in the UK, it is all good stuff. The datacentres are generally very good and well run like the infamous ones in docklands to name a few.

However I am sure the fellow brits will know all about Nthell (http://nthellworld.com) and BT.

I generally find telecommunications in the UK is very good once you are working.

Originally posted by tazd9t9
I kinda know what u mean about the price over here being cheaper than the USA for reseller accounts.
However i saw something interesting the other day, i bought internetworks magazine which came with a guide to webhosting and it has donhost and fasthosts both listed as top uk companies !!!!!!!!! may i ask what got into the publishers of that magazine lol

Regarding FastHosts - Probably due to the fact that FastHosts contribute an extrordinary amount to the advertising coffers of most UK Internet Magazines perhaps?

Cheers :cool:

Well, Internet Works is just full of Fasthosts adverts. Its a good read though and we subscribe to it. I guess you could say we get the best of both worlds, as we are UK based yet rent servers from the US.

As for fasthosts, there support is laughable, uptime is generally ok (not brill) and as for the mail server....Ahhhhhhhh!!! They also charge for extras like control panels, msSQL/ mySQL, stats...etc

Donhost have a good network but there attitude and policies are questionable. Many of there resellers have had accounts deleted without reason. (sure there are posts on this in here somewhere)

Our resellers plans easily matches theres in terms of price (we are cheaper then both) yet we offer more (webspace, bandwidth) because of the strength of the British £ against US Dollar.

Oh and be aware of resellers offering "Unlimited" webspace and bandwidth.

Sorry to be off subject but....

The Pound has not been stronger than the dollar since 1998

Where did you get that info from?

Hi, sorry, I meant to say that because we get more features in the US then in the UK for our money, we can then pass the saving/ offer more to our clients. One of the main reasons of purchasing in the US is bandwidth cost.

I cannot compare the quality of US and UK hosting because I am using only services from US (server) based companies.

Last year, before starting the web hosting business I have searched for more than 2 months and sent more than 300 messages at hosting companies offering reseller packages and thoroughly studied the posts in this excellent forum.

Globally, the UK companies are far more expensive than US ones and have a extremely low flexibility in dealing with potential customers (I refer to custom packages).

In US you have, as somebody already written, a lot of facilities you can pass to your clients.

Don't be fooled by the unlimited offers you will find in UK.

US is also a market where the competition is higher than in UK and as always, the results of a competition are better customer service and better financial conditions. If you can pass thru the marketing "maskirovka" you will find also where you can have the best foundation of your web hosting business.

Good luck.