I`m planning to start reselling very soon and I know wich host I should take. But I don`t realy know how much I should earn on each account. To answer this question I have to think of how many that I can handle, but I have no idea. Can someone tell me their experience with quantum versus support and how many clients a one man host can handle. (It`s reselling not dedicated server, so there is no technical maintainence involved)

Haakon

Well some hosts offer a flat 50% off there packages to resellers with this in mind I would say you could mark that up 30 to 40% and do quite well for your self. As far a how much support one person can handle this would depend on who you resell for.
Some questions to ask your self would be, do they there self have excessive amounts of down time, do they have a control panel that allows users to manage there accounts, do they offer you fast support so you can pass it on to your customers.
All of this would factor in on how one person could handle support.

But if its a good host you resell for than you could handle quit a few customers with one person support.

Yes Paul, I should have been more specific. They offer a very good control panel, they claim 99.9% uptime, and have a very good response time. Lets say this is true, can anyone give me some estimates, based on their own experiances.

Based on my experience, I would budget about one hour of support time per day per 150 customers. Depending on what level of customer you are targeting, that should give you enough time to provide quality service at an average level. This assumes that, as you noted, a good self-service control panel is available.

Thank you very much Travis. My thought was around 1000 costumers so you brought me some very good news :-)

with 1000 customers you are making a living ;)

Yes... if you're reselling, and thus don't have any other costs, 1000 customers at an average of $5/month each is not a bad living at all for one person.

Of course, with a base of 1000 customers, I'd sure look at renting a few dedicated servers, and a part-time admin if need be, so I could keep a lot more of that monthly fee. :)

Some customers will be asking your questions and needing help all the time while others will never contact you. It all averages out in the end.

Hello
When I set up as a reseller I decided to aim at a minimum of $3 profit per plan per month.
Obviously most of the plans make much more than that.

Not much of a business plan, but it has stopped me getting into silly loss leaders and let me build up a reasonable customer base while still making a profit.

Now I have moved to my own servers I am getting enough sign ups per day to be sure to cover the monthly server costs. The profit margin on each plan jumped way up immediately, because the costs are lower.

Still not making a living from it, but the hosting operation is covering its costs with huge amounts of spare capacity which will all turn into profit eventually.
Also, there is potentially less worry because I can go in and fix things without waiting on a host to do it.

Gordon