Hello,

I saw a topic on here regarding a package which enabled this features for a popular control panel. I was curious what the community thought of this in general?

To simplify:

Standard hosting (Admin -> Reseller -> User)
This would be (Admin -> Reseller -> Sub Reseller -> User)

I'll share my thoughts, and hope others can give me their insight.

My opinion:
I feel that if you allow resellers to create resellers, it does 2 things.. 1 it helps flood the market with even more resellers, and 2 it takes reseller business away from the main host.

It also adds a heavy level of complexity when reporting/trying to figure out who is what where why how. With the price of control panels and vps's these days, it seems that anyone interested in becoming a web host can do so with < $100 a month. So is there really a need for sub resellers?

While I have your attention.. does anyone actually NOT allow their resellers to oversell? IE you give them 100 email accounts, they create a plan that gives 25 emails.. once they put 4 users on that plan, they can no longer create more users.. It seems the whole hosting market is based around overselling, why stop your resellers from doing this?

Thanks for your time!

The "sub reseller" concept is a dangerous one for the company providing the actual server management.

They have absolutely no idea who is on the server, or anything else about the accounts being "sold" to the actual end-users.

In other words, there is nothing to stop the first reseller to sell a sub-reseller account to someone they don't really know.. who proceeds to load up the server with porn, warez, hackable, exploited software, etc.

We will never allow sub-resellers to exist on our servers (even though many of our resellers have asked for this ability) because it is just "too far away" from our ability to know our clients.

Stability of our servers is more important then a few extra $$ of profit, imho.

That being said, there is definately a demand for this feature. Especially among the "cheapo/budget" clients, who expect the entire world for their $10/month reseller account. (Which is not our target market by a long shot.)

InnoHosting has a IR-Panel that allows resellers to sell reseller, I've not used it but maybe the concept might grow depending on if the panel has any flaws or not.