Hi,

This may sound like a dumb question, but when a reseller hosting account is almost full, do you order a second one?

For example say the reseller account has:

10GB space
100GB bandwidth

and for each customer you allocate 1GB space and 10GB bandwidth.

So 10 customers.

When you expect to get the 9th or 10th customer, do you purchase another reseller account? Or what do you do?

I understand that you can request your account to be upgraded, but then that will mess up the allocations, no?

Also if you want to a offer second, different plan (more space, etc) do you get two different reseller accounts?

I used to resell existing plans, so I'm new to modern reseller hosting.

I suppose it is easier to get dedicated servers for allocation, but I want to start off with reseller hosting.

Thanks.

I understand that you can request your account to be upgraded, but then that will mess up the allocations, no?
There is no reason why upgrading the reseller account should mess up the allocation, all that happens is they add extra disk, bandwidth etc to your account. Your clients accounts will be unafected.

I would say just upgrade it. There is no point in dealing with the hassle of 2 accounts.

In my case, I buy another account - that way I do not put all my eggs into one basket, if there is a server problem only a fraction of my clients is affected.

In my case, I buy another account - that way I do not put all my eggs into one basket, if there is a server problem only a fraction of my clients is affected.

that is a good point, however there is a large possibility that you get placed on the same server.

Yea I will probably be buying a second one soon if not a server. That way my paid clients can be on one, and free clients on the other.

that is a good point, however there is a large possibility that you get placed on the same server.

You could always request from your host that you don't get placed on the same server. I'm sure most hosts would be able to accommodate that request.

Maybe your provider allows overselling? If so, you dont need to upgrade, unless you run out of space utilization.

Joshua

Before I moved to a VPS I also outgrew one reseller account and bought a second and requested that the host put me on another server.

Looking back it was a lot easier becasue like a previous post stated. If a server goes down you only piss off some client's and failing your main hosting site over allows your clients to contact you.

Just upgrade to a higher plan. It shouldn't mess with anything.

Also, from your post I assume your Reseller doesn't allow Overselling. Otherwise you would have to upgrade only when all your clients actually use the total 10 GB.

When you have two reseller accounts, do you have only one hosting shopping cart?

that is a good point, however there is a large possibility that you get placed on the same server.

There is NONE possibility to be placed on same server, simply ask to be on different :)

I would also like to add: I am moving to H-Sphere slowly, so my accounts will be spread among different servers.

I have selected Eirca to host my sites and soon(?) to signup with Cartika to host my customers sites.

When you have two reseller accounts, do you have only one hosting shopping cart?
Yes.

Two reseller accounts is nothing to do with your Shopping Cart.

AFAIK, multiple reseller accounts can be setup within billing systems like WHMCS.

I am a fan of going with 2 accounts with different companies. I second tonyFF's recomendation. If you go with 2 companies you will be in 2 different data centers. Theoretically, if you had a issue with one company you could deploy your sites on your other account relatively quickly as a fail safe. Just make sure you keep backups. I have a reseller account with hostgator who has been around for a long time and has given me excelent service. I use a standard shared account for my company portal, and I have a reseller account for personal use. My company site has been up for over a year, and I have never had any noticable issues. I switched my reseller account to Trexhost, and then went straight back to hostgator when the whole trexhost going out of business fiasco happened. I also have 2 VPS accounts with bigvps. bigvps has offered great service, but it is an unmanaged VPS solution so there is no support for issues other than infrastructure outages. They take a while to setup the VPS, but once it is setup, it is very stable. I can say I have been with them for 6 months and also never seen noticeable issues. I say noticeable issues because I have never seen any issues, but that doesn't mean there have been none. It just means none of my users or myself have seen any. Bottom line is I have had great experiences with both companies.

If you plan on getting two reseller accounts check with your host what server you will be put on. If it's in the same server as the one you are currently on I would just upgrade to avoid the hassle of two accounts. If it's a different server then that would be better and if a different datacenter even better so that way you can offer your services from different datacenters :).

Upgrading will work just fine (won't screw up any allocations), however if you're filling up your reseller account you'll want to consider making the switch up to a dedicated server. The added freedom of outright owning a dedicated server will help you provide improved services to your clients.

Upgrading will work just fine (won't screw up any allocations), however if you're filling up your reseller account you'll want to consider making the switch up to a dedicated server. The added freedom of outright owning a dedicated server will help you provide improved services to your clients.
This is true, but I would advise against doing this too quickly. The jump from reseller to dedicated can be daunting for even the most experienced business person. They are two very different animals; reseller hosting has a lot of hand holding with it, dedicated hosting tends to be less "hands on" from the providers side when it comes to the business side of things. I have seen some companies bottom out when they went from a reseller hosting solution to dedicated, some even prefer the large reseller hosting account as opposed to dedicated. Reseller -> Dedicated is not always the right move.


Simon

The advantage of a VPS solution over a dedicated server would be the ease of upgrading; if you need more storage space, they just increase your allotment on the SAN. If you need more CPU time, they just give you a bigger share of the box, or move you to a new one. You can grow your VPS right up until you're using up the entire box, at which point it's effectively a defacto dedicated server (just potentially without the ability to change the kernel without pygrub).

Some of those upgrades to the VPS (such as moving it to a new box to get more CPU time) don't even require a reboot; Xen can migrate a running VPS between physical machines with only a few milliseconds of downtime.

With a dedi server, getting more resources (beyond bandwidth) usually means hardware upgrades and downtime.