I spent the last several years hosting my own sites so I would become more familiar with what was involved and in how to set things up. I now feel ready to move on to being a host and hopefully make some money. I am homebound so I have the time to offer good support and I want my service to be reliable.

In trying to decide on who to go with as a reseller, I have been doing a lot of reading of the info on various hosts websites.
From what I have seen, they (99% of the time) advertise a 98-99.9% uptime. Based on my truly HORRENDOUS experience with Valuablehost, I am no longer naive enough to believe those lies.
My question, how can I find realistic figures of the uptimes for hosts? What standards should I look for regarding backups and what happens if the servers crash etc? What are some of the other factors I should consider?

Who are your hosts or good hosts to get reseller account with? What kinds of reseller packages would be considered great and what are the estimated price of those packages?
I am interested in providing specifically hosting of e-commerce sites where we will offer installation, customization and maintenance of a specific software package plus content management (if wanted) thus I am looking at offering sites that are at least 300MB. What would be a reasonable bandwidth for such a site?

What would you recommend as far as ways to market the hosting plans? As I said I am homebound so I am not able to go around to local businesses and solicit them. I do plan to put promotional information together to send to new businesses that get permitted in the area and in the state.
etc.

Any help and advice would be truly appreciated.
Thanks
Lin

as far as up time most will tell you 99-98% and should be able to provide that. Ask what kind of network and NOC they are in, what kind of bandwidth providers, ask about their back up policy how often what kind of media etc. How long have they been in business. Ask here about their reputation do a search on them here.


As far as bandwidth you will need no one can tell you that based on the size of a program, depends if visitors are going to be downloading a ton of the 300 mb or if that is backend size to. If they are going to be downloading most of that then you will needs lots of it, maybe better to get your own dedicated.

Marketing is something you should already have an idea about since you have a package to sell and not just general hosting, trade magazines, direct calls, direct letters etc, try and hire a sales crew. All of the above targeted to your demographic is the best apporach.

Monte

over the last month, I have been unhappy with my hosting company because of mail server issues that they denied and tried to blame on my isp!
seems resolved, they are getting new mail servers though!

on thing they have been great about is uptime, I don't recall a single occurence when my site or theirs was not up. :beer:
they also do have a live person to call with your problems

granted their price is cheap but the value is great, I'd still recommend them for basic hosting.
www.your-site.com

one thing though, they don't run linux or win, they are on sun solaris.

Badr

Originally posted by bluephoenix
Based on my truly HORRENDOUS experience with Valuablehost, I am no longer naive enough to believe those lies.

Sorry to hear that. My experience with Valuablehost has been fine. I signed up when Valuablehost was bought over by new owners. They've bent over backwards to get things right. They now have new servers which everyone is being upgraded to.

I guess its a case of "You cant please everyone" when hosting companies take on more clients then they simply cant support. As a rule, we dont do this and Im sure many of the companies who frequent this forum do the same. Bigger is not always better.

Just my £.02p worth!

We have a monitor that monitors the services on our server and will be setting up another one soon any of our customers can look at it. This way our customers know what the actual uptime of our server is.

Maybe other hosts should start doing this

Sean

We do the same thing, as well as pay four companies to monitor our network and core servers. What this client is referring to was three days of wonderful DoS attacks. We worked around the clock with our upstreams to get them blocked they would just move them to another group of servers and peg our inbound at 97 to 98%.

We try to keep every customer, in fact our annualized churn will be under 1.7% for the year, in this industry that is awesome.

We have offered credits to our customers because we did not meet our guarrantees, even though it had nothing to do with our network and in accordance with our SLA we didn't have to. Sometimes folks just can't be made happy, although we try and we are truly sorry for the problems.

Originally posted by CarrigHOST
We have a monitor that monitors the services on our server and will be setting up another one soon any of our customers can look at it. This way our customers know what the actual uptime of our server is.

Maybe other hosts should start doing this

Sean

Good to see others are doing this as well. We had to build our own monitoring software for our network and servers, that our founder named Spyhunter, after a favorite video game of his, because at the time there was nothing out there for companies like ours.

It not only alerts us if anything's going on that it doesn't like, but it also calculates our uptimes and displays them to our customers.

I'd recommend looking for an SLA, with terms that you are comfortable with and can afford. Read the fine print, twice.

Uptime guarantees are not the same.