There are so many reseller companies offering reseller packages with unlimited domains hosting plans. How do they manage manage to offer unlimited domains hosting plans. If a company is offering 1GB for $20 with unlimited domains plans.
And company put 30 reseller accounts in one box and each reseller host 50 domains then for 30 it would be around 1500 domains per box and each will be using cgi-bin/scripts/mysql etc.
Does it means the reseller companies box are overloaded.

You have a mess of "if"s there. I'll add one here. If your question is your last sentence, well, one would think so; eh?

:D:D:D:D

Yes, overloading is a problem, but really it doesn't matter, shared accounts can overload the very same box, in fact there is no real difference between the two types of accounts.

If is the key word there.

The average reseller host 10 domains on a plan like that, some more some less. But yeah if everyone hosted a 20 meg plan and did 50 of them then you would have a crowded box. It is kind of a numbers game just like bandwidth space etc. You gamble they are not going to go insane and do that. Sometimes you win sometimes you lose. Once the server starts getting in the 300 to 350 domains range it is up to host to find a way to balance the load. It also depends on the sites how much resources they use.
I have one customer that has 98 domains hosted on an account like that. Most of them are one and two page static sites so they use hardly any resources you could host 2000 of those and not be overloaded.

Where one or two heavy use sites could eat your resources, domain count is not always a good measure of how loaded a server is.

So how company decide the resellers package for unlimited domains. There are so many companies offering 1GB for around $10-$15 per month for unlimited domains. They can not survive if they don't put 25 reseller account in one box.

Dunno you tell me how they do 1 gig for $10.00 a month.:confused:

But that is what I am saying they host 25 to 30 resellers on the box but each reseller they host will host about 10 domains not 50 on a plan like that.

You never mention how much bandwidth is involved. Sure you can do unlimited domains but when you limit the reseller bandwidth to say 20g then there is only so many domains they can get in that bandwidth.

if you have limits on the space and bandwidth, then that will be your limiting factor for the number of domains you can host. if there are no limits, then it's a matter of the host hoping that most users will not use most or all of the resources given to them. as Monte said, most would tend to only use a limited amount of space and such, so you're free to have more customers.

Unlimited domains isn't at all like unlimited space and bandwith. You could truly have practically unlimited (more than you would could ever use) domains hosted on an account. Assign each domain about 1 KB of space and 2 KB of bandwith. ;)

Originally posted by Monte
Dunno you tell me how they do 1 gig for $10.00 a month.:confused:

But that is what I am saying they host 25 to 30 resellers on the box but each reseller they host will host about 10 domains not 50 on a plan like that.


You can go the Webhosting request forum and see there are so many companies doing it. Thats what make me wonder :o

Yes and I see people offering $2.00 a month hosting plans there also. Not many of them will be in business 6 months down the road but they offer it and people buy it.

If you look at the reseller host that are in it for the long run (splashost, Mchost, HTTPme, Voxterme ) the prices are not that cheap.

Originally posted by rathgar
You never mention how much bandwidth is involved. Sure you can do unlimited domains but when you limit the reseller bandwidth to say 20g then there is only so many domains they can get in that bandwidth.


The question should be if that company allows their resellers to oversell their alloted resources.

Which of course most will do.

That is where problems will occur.
Even MORE so if the company is overselling to their resellers.

Asking for trouble.

Originally posted by clockwork

The question should be if that company allows their resellers to oversell their alloted resources.

Which of course most will do.

It really depends on what control panel the web hosting company is running. For instance, Plesk doesn't allow resellers to oversell, but cPanel/WHM does. I believe the reason for that is because the Plesk reseller-client level isn't always meant to be for resellers, as a shared hosting site would get access the reseller-client level too. On the other hand, WHM is meant to be for resellers and resellers only (not the WHM used by the root user, but by resellers).

Originally posted by clockwork



The question should be if that company allows their resellers to oversell their alloted resources.

Which of course most will do.

That is where problems will occur.
Even MORE so if the company is overselling to their resellers.

Asking for trouble.


Overselling is part of the business although some server owners do not. Most resellers even with the 'overselling' option usually do not have too many clients.(5>20) Those that do build up to a high level soon are wanting their own 'box'. The 'overselling' idea is a good carrot to dangle at a prospective reseller client. It is a little like going to a all you can eat buffet but never eating as much as you intended to. :)

I know some (VenturesOnline.com being one) limit you to the amount of space your account has. To be more specific, some do not allow you to oversell disk space, so if you have 1 GB to sell, you can have only two 500 MBs or 10 100 MB accounts.

SplashHost.com ran into a problem I believe with some people just overloading the server with domains, you can only add so many into WHM without running into problems. They were one of the first to institute hard limits, which I commend, they are still extremely generous with their limits.

Like anything many of the unlimited hosts, no matter what they advertise as unlimited play the number games.

We removed the word "unlimited" completely from the site. It doesn't sit right with me offering something that doesn't exist. We replaced the word "unlimited" with "Multiple".

We don't oversell the server with the number and sizes of reseller accounts on the server. We do however allow the clients to oversell their WHM accounts. It's a fine line to walk, but if we took away the overselling option for WHM accounts, they would become less feasible for folks.

Reseller accounts are a temporary stop for folks who are cruising along. They usually have their eye on a dedicated server somewhere and that's a good progression. If they get a dedicated with WHM/Cpanel, then there is only a slight learning curve as they're used to that environment. Of course this depends on how "managed" their dedicated server is....

The trick with overselling is that it's really only a problem if you haven't seen to it that you CAN provide what's bought. 99% of the sites I'll host on a 100 or 200 meg plan will never use more than 20 megs probably, but as I have my plans priced (as a reseller) I can purchase more resources after only 4 clients, so I can make sure I keep my resources and needs in sync.

Yep Bob, we removed ours as well awhile ago, just didn't sit well to see the use of it as a marketing term, it confuses the customer into thinking their getting something for nothing, and as technically difficult as some aspects of the hosting side of the Internet, that's the last thing they need, even though they are starving for knowledge at times.