Hello everyone,

In a legal sense of view, do you reveal your resellers to others? I ask this because I want to be prepared for my planned venture into offering reseller accounts. Currently, I am offering only the normal virtual hosting. Offering reseller accounts I understand should maintain your anonymity to your reseller's clients. However in case you have 2 clients who are into legal tussle for example, and one needing information regarding the other, do information needs to be revealed? I might also add this to my AUP for resellers soon. :)

Any idea is highly appreciated.

most resellers want to have %100 anonymous hosting. and if you disclose any information, then visitors realize that you are not providing anonymous hosting.

You should not disclose any information about your clients unless ordered to under the law.
This would just protect you in compliance with any Privacy Laws.

*Do not take this as legal advice from a qualified lawyer*

Definetly don't tell anyone who your resellers are, they can tell people if they want them to know. Generally it is easy to discover however the fact that someone is a reseller by doing a whois on their domain, since their domain must point to the nameservers of the server which generally contain the name of the hosting company. One way around this is to get the nameservers the datacenters give to people who rent servers(assuming the hosting company who sells the resellers rents their servers from a datacenter or colo's them) but thats another story.

Remember the reseller has to agree to your terms of conditions so if they have people doing illegal things then you should only have to deal with them, if they don't take care of the problem then you suspend their reseller until the problem is fixed. Isn't the point of selling resellers to not have to deal with the individual website client?

You could always put it into your Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, and add a feature that makes users and customers read it and say that they agree to it before they can order an account from you.

We have a strict privacy policy which our customers demand. So we will not provide anyone with a list or tell them who we host.

I would not reveal any information about a customer to anybody without a legal order. Your customers need to trust you. You have access to all their client list and other data. Once they find out that you can't be trusted, you will lose more of them.

The only way you should reveal any of your customers (resellers or not) to other potential customers, is if your customers agree first. In other words, ask their permission first.

If you have a good relationship with a particular reseller (or two or three...), then there's no harm in asking them if they mind you using them as a reference.

Rob.

if you reveal your clients other resellers and hosts could approach them with lower costs...

I would see this as a big nono.

We allow our Resellers to remain 100% anonymous. In areas of disputes or complaints we interface only with the Reseller and not the party that is complaining against them. It has posed the fewest legal problems with us for sure over the last 5.5 years.