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Allow me to speak on the reseller concept.
I sersiously looked at buying a reseller plan a year or so ago. I did alot of research and had it pinned down to a few reseller (no i cant recall at the moment whom they where). I was looking because to be quite honest when you have more than 1-3 sites it can get rather expensive paying $10-20/site for hosting. Expecially if the sites are not big revenue generators.
I myself have about a dozen websites that are regsitered in my name.
I heard about the ability to buy a reseller package and basicly get alot more disk and bandwidth than you would if you got regular 'enduser' packages for the same money if not less.
The way resellers work is like this. Lets say I own a server. You have three basic classes of users. You have the enduser whom has only 1 account or a very few accounts per domain and does not have the ability to do anything other than to manipulate their own account. Then you have resellers. These are people that have power to create accounts on the server. Create hosting packages on the server (diskspace, bandwidth limits, etc). They also are classified as being the owner of any account they create. The final class is the admin of the server. This class of users has root access to the server. They can restart services, reboot the server, install services access anyones file, etc.
Resellers pay X amount of money for the ability to sell space from their quota. Most reseller packages will have a defined number of domains tey can sell or might have a set amount of bandwidth they can see or a fixed amount of diskspace or any of the above three. For example a common reseller account might be something like this.
10Domains
20Gigs Disk
200Gigs Bandwidth
This would allow the reseller to sell upward to 10 domains or assign 10 or less domains to their alloted 20gigs or allow them to issuse 10 or less domains with a total bandwidth quota of 200gigs. Resellers often are allowed to configure their own packages as well as sell those packages at what ever cost they can. So if you pay $50 for the above package and you sell 10 domains with 2gigs of disk and 20gigs of bandwidth for $10 each you come out with a net profit per month of $50. Resellers are often responsible for managing their clients tech support needs. So day to day support questions would go to the reseller vs the server admin or the person whom the reseller is buying space from. Should the reseller need support because they cant access something on the server then they have to turn to the server admins for assistance. Usually the only thing resellers can do is restart services. Rebooting the acual server is usually not permitted to resellers.
One reason I dont like reseller accounts is that you place yourself in a position to sell accounts to others but if the customer needs hardware support the reseller has to turn to the server admins and that can cause a break down in communication. Often resellers try to hide the fact that they are indeed just resellers so direct communication between the end user and the server admin is not common.
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