I'm thinking of starting a reselling business, but just now i feel I don't have the correct amount of technical knowledge about this. I'm trying to learn new things all the time, but I just have a couple of questions regarding the technical aspects of reselling.

What exactly are nameserver? I know I can have my own nameservers such as ns0.mydomain.com and that each of my 2 main nameservers are linked to an IP address each. But what exactly are nameservers? How do they work? Am I meant to have a set of 2 nameservers for each server I will have or can i just use the 2 nameservers for all the servers I have?

If I want to eventually start giving away space/servers to resellers, how would I give them their own nameservers, mailservers etc...

Thanks for your time in advance...I'm just trying to figure out how everything in this business works.

I'm new to reselling myself, though I've been around the block (more than a few times) with hosting in general. I hope I can help with a few of your questions:

>What exactly are nameserver?

When someone registers a domain name, say coolname.com, people on the internet have to know what server to look at to find the files for coolname.com. This is done by a series of master name servers that keep track of all the domain names and on what network they are located. Every night, or two nights, each ISP has a server that asks the master name servers for any changes - they then update the location of anything that's moved. In coolname.com's case, after it's registered within 48 hours, most of the ISPs on the internet will know where it is (for example if it's hosted at Verio). Now it's a little more complicated than this because the machines at Verio need to know where to send traffic for coolname.com. This is what a DNS server does. The ISP sends the traffic to the address in the master name server (which is the DNS server at Verio) and Verio forwards that through the DNS server to the specific directory and files for coolname.com. It looks like this:

Request for coolname.com -> ISPs Name Servers -> Verio DNS -> coolname.com's files.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I hope it explains it well enough.

>If I want to eventually start giving away space/servers to >resellers, how would I give them their own nameservers, >mailservers etc...

You'll probably need dedicated servers for this, but I'll let someone else speak to that.

Dave

You could either resell reseller plans or get your own dedicated server with a CP like WHM/CPanel

That way you could provide private name servers to your clients.
You need 2 IP's for Name servers.