ihostgreen Posted July 4, 2008 Share Posted July 4, 2008 Hi, I am looking for some advice as the other thread in here about "How big is your company" has really showed what great community spirit WHMCS and this forum has, so I thought I would ask some experts advice We are not a huge host only a a couple of customers really but we do have bigger business else where design wise and IT support etc. I have been approched by a handful of customers and potential customers about selling VPS or dedicated servers to them. I am wanting to know what you think is the best way for a small host to approach this. My first idea was to get a dedi server (decent one) with our current host (as we are only a reseller currently) and then virtualize it and then sell each VPS off to the customer that purchase them. Or would I be better offer building my own server and renting rackspace and bandwidth and doing it like that? Thanks in advance and I look forward to your comments. Firstpro 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihostgreen Posted July 7, 2008 Author Share Posted July 7, 2008 Any one here deal with VPSs? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
othellotech Posted July 7, 2008 Share Posted July 7, 2008 Any one here deal with VPSs? yes If a customer requires dedicated resources, or a custom setup, then a VPS or Dedi is offered. If they want to have their own resellers, a dedicated server is needed. If they're running a high-end e-commerce system then they need g'tees of availability and features - a VPS at a minimum is needed etc. Shared hosting is great and still forms the majority of our customerbase, but there are a great number of situations that it's not the best solution for the client ... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel Posted July 7, 2008 Share Posted July 7, 2008 Generally its cheaper to just rent a server from your current provider if you have very few of them. It doesn't really make much sense in colo'ing just one server. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handsonwebhosting Posted July 9, 2008 Share Posted July 9, 2008 We've been through the business of renting dedicated servers, then then pulling everything in house for a few years, and we're back outsourcing it again Keep in mind, if you bring it inhouse, YOU (and your team) must be physically near your comptuers so you can swap a hard drive when it crashes at 3am. That means if you're running a small shop, no more vacation, because the one time you decide to go on a fishing trip, the system will have an issue. Most times, the local data center will not provide much assistance without a lot of money for the help. Automated reboots etc are great and you can get a PDU to do that for you and allow users to log in and reboot the server themselves. If you want hardware, drop me a note. I have about 80 servers here from P4 2.4's to Dual Xeons all just sitting here. I also have a number of PDU's which allow Reboot over IP. My own suggestion would be to rent the equipment and sell accordingly. Even setting up on an affiliate program so that the customers pay someone else and you get a kickback is often a better situation than trying to support the hardware (at least initially). Weather to go VPS or Dedicated - we do both. There's a pretty high fraud rate and turnover with VPS in the general market, but we really haven't seen it ourselves. Dedicated Servers are fairly solid. We have a number of customers with dedicated servers for the past 4 years that have no problems other than a few glitches that we assist with. Our dedicated servers are listed at http://www.handsondedicated.com - but as of about a month ago, we pulled many of the configurations and went with TWO configurations and provided management. This option worked out very well for our customers. But we still over custom configs. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihostgreen Posted July 10, 2008 Author Share Posted July 10, 2008 Thanks chaps thats all good stuff to know. Well our demand only reaches to VPS's for now, one step at a time for us. We are looking to do the whole renting from a DC and then virtualize that machine out and then sell on. Looking to use OpenVZ & HyperVM to do this but not sure about the whole LXadmin control panel need a bit more shopping around. As for datacentre I was going to use theplanet as you do Conor but really they seem very expensive... Not sure how any one makes enough profit to justify the time being put in to it. I have on the other hand found another datacentre that has got good reviews on independant websites and the mark up and profit is such that it is well worth doing... But sent them an email regading some terms and conditions to their sales dept and looking to make a purchase asap and its been 2 days and no response! Doesnt really give me confidence for their support which is a shame as the prices are decent! And the profit made could be good Hmmm... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handsonwebhosting Posted July 10, 2008 Share Posted July 10, 2008 I actually never thought that the planet was expensive, and now expecially with their 25% off coupon on their main page it actually makes it harder for us as a reseller of dedicated servers to sell our own machines! But, that's business, and they do a lot of it. I was fortunate to have a tour and a roundtable discussion withe Doug Erwin (CEO) in February of this year. Great places, great people and a lot of great ideas for the future of The Planet. There's not much bad stuff I could really say about them as they've been a pretty huge part of our own business over the years. Whether to go with OpenVZ or Virtuozzo, I've done Virtuozzo myself but some of our staff here have used Zen and then swapped over to OpenVZ and using cPanel for the control panel for clients. Don't get me wrong, you'll not be able to offer 30GB disk space with cPanel and charge $20/month and make a profit - but then hopefully that's not the market you were after 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihostgreen Posted July 10, 2008 Author Share Posted July 10, 2008 Conor, we are aimed a the UK VPS market and average cost for a decent VPS is around $50-$60/£25-30 a month with that in mind we can sell similar price 40GB hard drive 512meg dedicated ram up to 600meg burstable, and cPanel as a control panel and if the one dedi box gets full then that is a return where 70% is profit and other 30% pays for box. Needing 3 clients to break even... But this company seems a bit flaky if they take 48 hours to get back to a sales email!! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handsonwebhosting Posted July 10, 2008 Share Posted July 10, 2008 48 hours response is unacceptable with ANY company doing business on the web - especially a dedicated server company. The 48 hour response that you're waiting on is with the OTHER company, not with The Planet right? If it's with the planet, jump into their live help and rip them a new one. There shouldn't be any reason for a delay. We get custom servers configured through The Planet that do take some time to configure (Quad Xeon's and 16GB RAM with 8 hard drives etc) but on a general rule, they're usually pretty fast with the responses. The part that makes the VPS expensive for us (in the competitive market) is the cPanel. Since the software costs atleast $8/month for each VPS by the time you take your server, bandwidth and power consumption and then tack on $8.00 it doesn't leave much room. For a $50-$60 price range you should be able to get a decent Quad Core server at The Planet. Right now they have Dual Xeon 5130's for $194 with coupon code "srv1". Granted that only has 2GB ram and 500GB hard drives (two of them), but if you have your own line to cPanel to get the VPS licenses it may work out cheaper than normal for you. At $50-60 you'd need at least 4 clients to break even. Not sure if I'm helping or hurting on the decision making process for you 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihostgreen Posted July 11, 2008 Author Share Posted July 11, 2008 48 hours is a bit long for some sales info your right, but I jumped on their live chat and got it all sorted... Cant find dedi servers cheaper any where so think we will have to use them for our VPS as well the profit it alot higher... I think I will test them out my self first see how their support goes before I start selling stuff on to our customers dont want to end up us looking bad because of them! Thanks for your help Conor, cPanel is the way to go I think... Either than or we do a custom one but I dont even wanna think about that yet! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handsonwebhosting Posted July 11, 2008 Share Posted July 11, 2008 One thing at a time! There'll always be time to customize and enhance! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihostgreen Posted July 16, 2008 Author Share Posted July 16, 2008 Exactly... So thats final we are going with the new DC going to use hyperVM and cPanel just hope I can get it working as its the first time virtualising without it being a VMWare server for instance. Thanks for the info Conor much appreciated. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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