Looking at offers made to resellers, the possibility to have ones own name servers is alwayse praised as something in the interest of the reseller: RESELL FOR US!! WE ALLOW YOU TO HIDE THE FACT THAT YOU ARE ONLY A RESELLER!!!

On the other hand there are these "Should I host with a reseller or not" threads, and general opinion seems to be that it doesn't matter, that one may even get better service from a reseller than from the actual "plumbing provider".

I'm asking myself if providing name servers for resellers isn't rather in the interest of the hardware provider, in order to prevent clients of resellers to get in touch with the actual ISP bitching and moaning about poor service etc. or even sue the actual ISP rather than the reseller if things get very bad...

Therefore my question to you ISPs working with resellers: Is it ok for you if a reseller tells his clients upfront that he's a reseller and who he is reselling for?

Are there ISPs who even urge resellers not to reveal their identity?

I can't speak for others, but I have no problem with one of our resellers telling their customers that they are a reseller for us. The name servers for the resellers are offered more to help the reseller personalize their offerings than to try to hide the fact that they are resellers.

Over 70% of our resellers live outside the US, and when I view their pages, they are in different languages. Our resellers are offering their customers a service that we can not provide by offering customer support in several different languages. This seems to benefit all concerned. We open up new markets that we would normally not be able to because of the language barrier, the reseller gets to offer a quality product without the expense of dedicated servers, and the end user gets customer support in their native language. Everyone wins.

Well put James! And what a great sales pitch...

We offer the dependability of XYZHosting coupled with webdesign and support in *insertlanguagehere*! Sometimes it does boost confidence for the client to know that you are backed by a solid company and NOT just some host that no one has heard of.

There are pluses and minuses with signing up through a reseller, but this is one great example of how it is could be a big benefit to the customer.

That assumes the client knows of the parent hosting company.

I'd submit too that a reseller or sales agent would be more likely to provide better service because they are smaller. While not a guarantee you generally get better service from smaller businesses than larger faceless corps.

UnitedTech.....well said:

I can't speak for others, but I have no problem with one of our resellers telling their customers that they are a reseller for us. The name servers for the resellers are offered more to help the reseller personalize their offerings than to try to hide the fact that they are resellers.

I like our resellers to tell them about us....we have nothing to hide. In fact, we want our resellers to be as productive as possible....its a win-win for all of us.