Reselling and stuff

Moif_Murphy · 7th August 2007

Hello,

Great forum, have been scouring it all afternoon! I do have a few questions. I'm thinking of starting a simple service where friends have around 300-500MB space and perhaps the ability to install a gallery / blog site amongst other things. I'm not keen on anything too advanced though, I won't be dealing with Joomla, ZenCart or anything like that.

Initially I'd be looking at catering for 50-100 accounts and I was wondering what kind of packages I should be looking at and what kind of features I'd be looking for.

Actually thinking about it I'd be looking for individual FTP accounts, MySQL / PHP5 and email.

Thanks

PT-Rob · 7th August 2007

If you were thinking of hosting 50 - 100 accounts on a reseller account, you would want to find a host which offered a high amount of features (FTP Accounts / MySQL Accounts).

It would be hard to say how much bandwidth and disc space you would need as clients may not use all of their allocated space and bandwidth. You should stay away from a host that offers unlimited Disc Space and Bandwidth as that does not exist. You can do rough calculations such as 500MB x 100 clients which would mean that if each client used 500MB space you would need around 50GB space alone. You would probably be better off with a VPS. Or you could start with a high end reseller account then move up to VPS / dedicated if needs be.

thermaldegree · 7th August 2007

I'd say find a host who will let you upgrade as and when necessary - and stay away from anyone who offers "unlimited" anything because "unlimited" doesn't exist.

Always best to start off small since you won't know in advance how much people will use (and from experience I'd say most people use far less than you'd think), so you'll save money which will make life good

I wouldn't bother with a VDS at this stage - shared hosting servers are often more powerful for most budgets (a 128Mb VDS with cPanel, for example, will struggle under a moderate load - 256Mb would be the minimum I'd really recommend for hosting multiple sites), and may also be more reliable if you've never run a hosting service before

PT-Rob · 7th August 2007

Quote:

a 128Mb VDS with cPanel, for example, will struggle under a moderate load - 256Mb would be the minimum I'd really recommend for hosting multiple sites

I thought cPanel required at least 256 MB to run. Will it run on less then?

thermaldegree · 7th August 2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by HHS-Rob

I thought cPanel required at least 256 MB to run. Will it run on less then?

cPanel's site says 64Mb, but I'd never want to try that

128Mb is the bare minimum - at that level it's just a convenience add-on I suppose, rather than a proper tool used to run many websites at a professional level.

PT-Rob · 7th August 2007

Quote:

cPanel's site says 64Mb

Oh now that's just scary. That must be so slow

othellotech · 8th August 2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by HHS-Rob

I thought cPanel required at least 256 MB to run. Will it run on less then?

WHM will have all sorts of "interesting" problems with less than 256Mb RAM.
CPanel from the end-users viewpoint seems ok with much less.

Even if you did without the control panel, the performance of much of the common "community" applications - Gallery, phpBB, Wordpress on a 128KB VPS is little more than utter sh!te anyway once you have a few websites/databases/visitors.

Remember you'd have your own instance of MySql taking up ram as well as the database, your own instance of apache as well as the ram needed for the parsing and delivery of the pages, etc etc

A VPS isnt even close to a properly managed non-oversold quality shared hosting setup for resellers (i.e. something that doesnt retail on ebay for $0.99), its a "stop-gap" for those that really need a dedicated server, for developers who need SSH access, or for sites that require a specific o/s setup.

The only time a reseller should look at a VPS is if they *need* to sell reseller accounts themselves or require "root" (albeit virtual) and dont have the budget for a decent dedicated server. So a VPS in that instance, whilst a significant downgrade, is a cost effective temporary solution.