Hello everyone! In about 3-4 days I will be putting my new offer to sale. The product is ready, the marketin is ready, only one problem is left - hosting. The product is a CMS with graphic management system (colors, images etc.) that is targeted for small companies and people who want to start a website fast. I want to make the purchase & installation 100% automatic. The process will consist of: - CMS Installation - Subdomain configuration - Onlywire submission - Search engine submission After each purchase is made and paid these 4 steps will be initated on auto-pilot. The only problem is that I don't know what kind of hosting would be optimal for me because: - If I go with buying a new account for each customer I have to make installation by hand or make pre-installations for all the customers and then when someone makes a purchase he will get the data of one of the available installations. This has 2 disadvantages - one, there is work to do by hand. Second, when I will do pre-installations the hosting accounts will be valid for less then 12 months. Also - buying hosting accounts is the only solution I know. I have been working as a designer for about 2 years and I have never used dedicated servers or reseller accounts. But this time the solution I know seems to be stupid. So my question is: - If I get a reseller account from one of the hosting companies how does it work? Does the customer buy hosting from me or from the company. Can I setup new accounts on auto-pilot. Can I have a script to pre-install certain files on every new accout ? - If I get a dedicated server is it hard to configure it and setup limitations for every account. I know little about linux - I work on Windows on have only used WAMP for all of my design / CMS work. My goals are to: - Provide quality hosting for all of my customers - As the CMS is not demanding I do not need 1 GB space - evern 100 MB will be enough - I want it to be cheap - Have the possibility to auto-install scripts on each new account - Protect myself from 1 person using all of the bandwitch if it will be a shared account (for example sharing warez on his site or giant movies). - Make it easy to manage all the accounts - (OPTIONAL) When I release an update make it possible to update certain files on all of my customers accounts Any help will be apprecieated. Best regards Michael
You get the WHM panel access (if hosting is using cpanel) and you can create packages as you want with your limits for disk space, bandwidth etc... Everything is fairly simple, yes and you can automate everything. You just put the files in special folder and every new account which will be created will show those. Check our reseller offer!
You may want to consider a managed VPS solution. It's almost like a dedicated server, but you're not so alone when it comes to any issues you run into, and from the sound of it your hosting company wouldn't mind answering the questions you'd have. Limits are not really that big of an issue, just limit bandwidth, disk space, and do not allow ssh access unless users have a really really really good reason. If you do, make sure it's jailed shell.
Yes that's right if a hosting provider has CPanel then you get WHM where you may create your package for customers. But being a software vendor and provide support along with hosting service may become difficult sometime if the number of customer will increase. But it works and you may earn money on reselling.