As a potential reseller (or vps user) what options would I have in the likely event that:

Your reseller account goes down, taking all your clients sites and your very own site/support mechanism down too? Essentially because all my eggs are in the same basket!

Your clients cannot reach you because your site, email and everything else is obviously offline.

So what plans do you have in place in the event of such an embarassing situation?

There`s nothing worse for a client to find their site is down potentially for hours or more, then to find the actual company site down too.

As a potential reseller (or vps user) what options would I have in the likely event that:

Your reseller account goes down, taking all your clients sites and your very own site/support mechanism down too? Essentially because all my eggs are in the same basket!

Your clients cannot reach you because your site, email and everything else is obviously offline.

So what plans do you have in place in the event of such an embarassing situation?

There`s nothing worse for a client to find their site is down potentially for hours or more, then to find the actual company site down too.

You can either tell your clients the truth, or choose a hosting provider that does not have hours of unexpected downtime.

Some resellers like to just tell their clients something horrible happened that was out of their control, but that really does not make sense. If you are reselling another companies services and they are not offering reasonable uptime for the price you are paying, then you should find a more reasonable hosting solution or charge your clients more for a more expensive and reliable one.

Host your site in different server - simple :)

Host your site in different server - simple :)

Yeah, but if you`re using private nameservers and that `different server` goes down, it causes issues with those private nameservers too. They wouldn`t be able to resolve and the accounts on the reseller server would be down too?

Host your site in different server - simple :)

Yeah surf2bob. Move your site to a different hypothetical server, every time it hypothetically goes down.

Edit (due to recent post):

I think really the best thing you can do is choose a company that has good uptime. Clients can deal with 10 minutes of downtime every week or so, but several hours of downtime can cost you much more than you are paying for your hosting plan.

If you have information that really needs to be seen, make sure you go with reliability.

uah... '10 minutes of downtime every week or so'. Last summer, when I had downtime it was hard enough. I still remember those days. If I would have to go through that every week I would simply sell and retire :-)

anyway, by having your website setup into a shared account, on another hosting provider allows you to be up while your accounts are down. Allowing you to publish any relevant information to your customers. That is usually enough to keep customers happy when downtime happens.

However, it should not happen every week. Nor every month.... let's say it can happen a couple of times a year that a server goes down (a properly maintained server, of course ;) )

Q

Yeah, but if you`re using private nameservers and that `different server` goes down, it causes issues with those private nameservers too. They wouldn`t be able to resolve and the accounts on the reseller server would be down too?
Not really, unless that the downtime period it get too extended.

Not really, unless that the downtime period it get too extended.

How so?

If for example I had a reseller account and used the domain: myhosting.com

and registered nameservers ns1/n2.myhosting.com for use with that reseller account.

I would also setup a shared account on another networking again with the domain: myhosting.com and this is where I would host this domain which is my business/company site.

If the shared account/server went down, it would also cause issues with those private nameservers being used on the reseller account causing the resold accounts to fail?

Or did I miss something?:confused: This dns stuff is confusing!!!

No, otherwise, if our server goes down we would bring most of our shared accounts down too :), you register your nameservers at your domain registrar, on your own DNS zone you have to add an A record to the ns1 and ns2 pointing to their IPs, but if you main domain goes down, this does not affect to your resold account (on a separated server) unless the downtime period get's too extended.

uah... '10 minutes of downtime every week or so'. Last summer, when I had downtime it was hard enough. I still remember those days. If I would have to go through that every week I would simply sell and retire :-)

anyway, by having your website setup into a shared account, on another hosting provider allows you to be up while your accounts are down. Allowing you to publish any relevant information to your customers. That is usually enough to keep customers happy when downtime happens.

However, it should not happen every week. Nor every month.... let's say it can happen a couple of times a year that a server goes down (a properly maintained server, of course ;) )

Q

Sorry for the confusion there. I was generally speaking that most web site owners will not notice their web site down for 10 minutes on the off-hours once every couple of weeks.

I am fully for the 100% uptime idea, I just meant the majority of webmasters will not notice.

As it was said you can purchase a shared account and use it as a backup (mirror the content there and just add those nameservers). But if you have a dynamic website it will need constant updating.

You could also get a support domain such as yourhostsupport.com and just use that as a offnetwork support that is not on the same host or DC. This way if your site aswell as clients they have a way of geting updates aswell as talking to ther host.

the nameserver issue is solved by setting ns1 to a different server than ns2. (Haven't you ever wondered why there are always 2 of them ;) )

If the host is a decent provider, he will have 2 nameservers in sync, ns1 in a different network than ns2. Just check in dnsstuff.com before signing if nameservers are in different networks.

Q

No, that would be the case if he have 2 external DNS, however, he'll probably have his DNS set on the same server where his account are going to be hosted, but the main domain on a shared account.
In this case, if his main domain goes down, nothing is going to really happen, but if the DNS server where his resold account are going to be hosted goes down, then that would be a problem.

You can either tell your clients the truth, or choose a hosting provider that does not have hours of unexpected downtime.

Unexpected downtime is, as the name may suggest, never expected. How do you find a company that "does not have hours of unexpected downtime"?

We have an info blog on a totally different domain which is hosted on a totally different server in a totally different part of the world.

That way if we do have some kind of catastrophic failure that manages to take down everything we own, we can still communicate with our customers.

I highly recommend this. Even a free Blogger blog would do in a pinch. Something, anything that allows you to continue communicating with your customers in the even that your DCs are blown off the map.

We are doing something similar to this.
Making a support centre on a remote server in a totally different datacentre.

Have 2 reseller accounts and use regular backups on the second server. Change nameservers, and voila!

Good Luck

mM.... offline contact?

Is Failover server an option? :) Well, a reseller is really dependent on a good hosting provider