Hi there

I'm a graphic designer, based in the UK. Been in the game since 1989, at the end of last year I decided to go it alone and set up on my own. It's going very, very well and I'm getting a lot of new clients, some fairly big ones too :)

Up until now I've had a couple of really cheap reseller accounts, that have served the purpose, but the support is rubbish and there's a lot of downtime so I'm on the lookout for a new reseller account to accommodate my growing client list. I tried heartinternet.co.uk but I didn't like the control panel for managing the sites, so I've just cancelled.

The account will be used to host the sites I have built for my clients, this is quite profitable as I manage the site maintenance for them also, but I'm now thinking that, seeing as this doesn't add up to much in terms of disk space or bandwidth, that if I get a decent reseller account I could also start a hosting company as part of my service for people that want to have their own CPanel to manage their site.

After a week or so of reading this forum and researching various plans it's out of the following companies (in this order so far)
webkore.net
clook.co.uk
resellerzoom.com

The reason I like the above is because I'm after good uptime, private nameservers, good support, end user support and preferably a client billing system as part of the deal. I'd like your opinions of my choices.

As I'm not really technically minded, and always very very busy with work, the idea of end user support is very appealing, anyone got any experience of this?

Plus any other advice on starting up would be appreciated, I'd also like to be able to sell domain names with the hosting packages, I know it's probably not profitable but I think it makes a more 'complete' hosting site to offer this. I like the look of dotster.com for this?

When starting a hosting company, what do you do about a service level agreement and all the legal stuff?

Hope you guys can help and steer me in the right direction, there seems to be a lot of knowledgeable people here ;)

Depends on what legal stuff you mean,
but with the SLA.. there are templates out and about, and looking at SLA's from other existing companies helps, then you can write one for your services and make it pretty firm and covering all the areas.

Good uptime would be 99.99% SLA (meaning, if they fail to be online 99.99% of any billing cycle (usually a month) you would get a service credit) which is what we offer.

End user support?
Although we offer non-branded reselling (your own ns, your own non-branded panel for you and clients, and unbranded mail filtering server) we do tend to get emails from end-clients, which we do respond to as the reseller pleases, with an email footer, without one, using the reseller name, no name at all and of course all links going through the reseller domain name instead of our own.

After a week or so of reading this forum and researching various plans it's out of the following companies (in this order so far)
webkore.net
clook.co.uk
resellerzoom.com

The reason I like the above is because I'm after good uptime, private nameservers, good support, end user support and preferably a client billing system as part of the deal.I never knew that Clook offers end user support. Are you sure about this?

EDIT: Checked with Clook. They don't offer it.

When starting a hosting company, what do you do about a service level agreement and all the legal stuff?

Hope you guys can help and steer me in the right direction, there seems to be a lot of knowledgeable people here ;)

Just look over some existing web hosts terms of service, service level agreements and acceptable usage policies. You'll be able to get an idea of what you'll need to include and you can borrow some of what you see for your own ;)

Clook has been around a long time and I have yet to see negative things from them, they would seem to be a good choice.

I made a choice yesterday, and after weeks of researching I ended up going with hostgator. They weren't originally on my list but after looking at it again and reading some more reviews I decided I liked what they had to offer.

They don't offer end user support, but I decided I don't need that at the moment as I handle all of my clients web maintenance anyway and once I start selling some just hosting accounts I may look into outsourcing the support.

Impression so far is very good. Pre sales questions were answered quickly and politely via the live chat on their site.

Sign up and activation was lightning quick and the add on stuff (like enom and WHMAutopilot) was easy to sort out... unlike a few reviews I read it was obvious that they charge $25 for installing WHMAutopilot, it clearly states it when signing up.

The server is a lot quicker than my old reseller accounts and they even transferred my old accounts across for free.

I did have quite a few support questions for them (I was in a bit of a panic, due to downtime on my previous reseller account) but they were all answered quickly and efficiently via the live help.

It's still early days but I'm glad I went with hostgator, they helped me out of the sh1t yesterday, I hope they continue to impress me.

wao~ its good to hear that your are currenrtly satisfied, keep us updated after a while, thx