Hi, I have a couple of questions about reselling. Currently I don't have the time or the money to resell but I think that it's an interesting market.

1) How much bandwidth does the average customer use? If I only sell accounts with 1 gb bandwidth (target market: personal sites, small business sites) - about how much would each customer use? 500 mb? 800 mb? 1 gb?

2) How much time per day would need for support if you have:
a) 20 customers
b) 40 customers

Would 4-5 hours per day be enough to run a hosting company with 25 customers?

Now I know that each web host and each customer is different so it's probably hard to come up with precise answers - I'm just looking for some approximate figures.

Thanks

based on my knowledge, I would estimate the number of emails you get in regards to support will be somewhere around 30% of your customers.......20 customers = about 7 emails a day and so forth...
Although this is only on averages, some customers may flood you when they first sign up....

In terms of providing 4-5 hours a day.......It is not necessarily an issue of whether that is enough, the problem is that you have to be around most of the time........customers can ask for support at any time, so you really have to be online a fair bit each day to make sure you dont miss anything....

Hi Matti

All the answers are relative, we have in DTH, an average of 2 GB of BW per account, and 500 MB in HC, a lot more in SH :P.

Same happen with tickets, if you'll only host some friend sites, you may no have problems providing support 4-5 hours day, but if you don't go to host only friends sites, put yourself in their side, how much time do you want to wait to an answer of a support ticket?
As I said its all relative, we get avg. 5, 6 tickets by day in HC, with a base of +50 customers, +10 in DTH with more than 500 accounts, and only 1 by day in SH with +200 accounts.
If you set clear FAQs, have a forum where your customers can interact and ask/answer question each other, your support request we be low.

Hey, thanks for your answers

Basically, my plan would be to provide cheap hosting (compared to other hosts in my country) and I would tell people that it could take up to 12 hours before their support tickets are resolved. Sure, support would be a little slower but on the other hand my customers would get lots of stuff for their money.

25 customers should yield only about five tech calls per month, provided everything is working right. Support is easy if you have things set up correctly and your customers are "trained" on your systems.

Depending on what types of sites your hosting would you actually put a package together. Lets say a family is looking to post some family picture for other family members to review. More than likely that client will not use 50 megs of space an nowhere near 1 g bandwith.. On the other hand if a client is a business and is interested in selling items based on the number of items will he need more space and definitely more Gig transfers a month. A simple 5 page web site with minimal (5 per page) images and 200 word text on each page will not reach 50 megs of space but depending on his/her customer base 1 gig of transfer per month may not be enough.

In addition to my previous info:
try to take a short survey of what the site is going to contain..Lots of customers have no idea what they should get..You may want to offer a low bandwidth package and offer a small upgrade fee. If you buy into a reseller plan that allows you up to 20 accounts and you have 12 g of BW to divide you dont have to use all of it..You can keep on reserve and offer it to your clients as an upgradable feature.. 99.9% of web host have an account managing software that allows you to control how much of everything you can allot to your customers. Do much research before selecting.. You will learn a bunch from just the research alone..

Manny