| Posted by lochie, 04-26-2007, 05:24 PM | | How much would you advise people to spend on a reseller account with the following spec? I'm trying to research what people see as a fair price for specificly spec'd hosting accounts. Feel free to copy, paste and edit spec to your liking.
SAMPLE SPEC
Web space: 10GB
Domains: UNLIMITED
Monthly transfer: 60GB
Control panel: Cpanel & Fantastico
Database: UNLIMITED MySQL
If anyone has seen a similar spec, can you link me to it?
Thanks
Last edited by lochie; 04-26-2007 at 05:34 PM.
Reason: changing text a little to get more accurate results
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| Posted by jerett, 04-26-2007, 05:29 PM | | I dont like the 60GB transfer part. It's a bit low for 10GB of space. I would up it some and then you charge based upon your level of service and additional features you might have to offer. For example - we provide a level of support that fits our niche and requires a bit more knowledge in other areas so our monthly is a bit higher. Ask yourself - what is your service worth.
Generally for 10gb your looking in the $20 + range.
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-26-2007, 06:44 PM | | I would pay...lemme see....$15 - $18 a month for that
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| Posted by lochie, 04-26-2007, 06:44 PM | | Thanks for your reply, anyone else want to comment?
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| Posted by domaincart, 04-26-2007, 07:24 PM | | I don't believe what you can find a reliable reseller hosting under $20/month. Go away from too cheap offers. Good luck.
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| Posted by SoftDux, 04-26-2007, 07:56 PM | | One has to look at this from a management point of view as well.
Let's say you get the following dedi:
cPanel + fantastico + Clientexec
2x 80 GB HDD's on RAID
2GB RAM
PIV 2.8
500GB bandwidth
$120 pm (I know, this one will be difficult to find, you'll pay a bit more since it has RAID)
Now, when Linux + swap + cPanel is installed you really only have 50GB's worth of space to use.
So, 50GB = 5x 10GB reseller accounts & 5 reseller accountx x $20 = $100, so you're loosing out on $20 pm. Is it really worth it?
True, once can safely rely on overselling by say 20 - 30%, but what if all 6 / 7 resellers are high resource usage resellers? Then the CPU & RAM would quickly "dry up", and you'd be forced to upgrade.....
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-26-2007, 08:21 PM | | Lots of small thinking going on here. Speaking as a budget seller and reseller I can state that buying anything with any number of 80GB drives would be foolish.Our servers have 1.2TB RAID 5's in them (well, every one except the first one we bought before settling on this pricing model). We pay around $400 a month for such a server including cPanel and WHM. Yes we have some additional overhead but when a server can produce 3 times what we pay for it (without overselling) we can easily afford it.It boggles my mind why so many people think that budget hosts are running on budget hardware.
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| Posted by SoftDux, 04-26-2007, 08:33 PM | | I'm not necesarely saying he's a budget host, but rather that if he's considering this, he's probably going to start-off small. There's no need to get a $400 server if you only have 2 or 3 $20 resellers
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| Posted by foobic, 04-26-2007, 08:41 PM | | How long does the fsck take?
Back on topic: I think a reasonable starting price for reseller accounts is around $20 but you'd generally get much less than 10GB disk space. Keep in mind the question of overselling-enabled or not when comparing costs.
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-26-2007, 10:37 PM | | A loooong time
You make a good point about overselling in the reseller accounts. We have that shut off, for example, and I'd question the sanity of anyone who turns it on. I mean, why would you give away complete control of your disk space and bandwidth to your resellers?
Seems like a bad idea to me.
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-26-2007, 10:44 PM | | I see. I took his post to mean he was looking for a shared web reseller account but you're thinking he means more of a dedicated job. Different interpretations
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| Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-27-2007, 01:26 AM | | And how long does it take to recover that 1.5 TB in case of RAID array failure? We utilize 73 GB 15k SCSI drives in a RAID array and can recover a lost server in well under an hour and even in case of total disaster, still maintain a 99.9% uptime record. Obviously our pricing will be more expensive - and especially for disk space - but, it really depends on what you are after. Therefore, to answer the original posters question - that package can cost anywhere from $1 to $100 - it really depends on what level of service you are after.
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| Posted by foobic, 04-27-2007, 01:57 AM | | Right. That's why I'd avoid any reseller host using that sort of hardware.
Overselling enabled simply allows your clients to use more of the disk space and transfer you've allocated to them. Why wouldn't you be willing to do that if you're not overselling yourself?
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| Posted by lochie, 04-27-2007, 02:44 AM | | let me clarify, I'm looking for nothing, this is more market research
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| Posted by ldcdc, 04-27-2007, 03:06 AM | | Because you prefer to have some resources laying around rather than having them running scarce? (just theoretically speaking)
Even if he'd be overselling, some savings would probably be reflected in the price. These things tend to balance themselves out.
There are reseller hosting providers "specializing" in under $25 packages, with some success, but with the amount of space he's mentioned, finding a provider will be indeed hard.
Last edited by ldcdc; 04-27-2007 at 03:09 AM.
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| Posted by scrapme, 04-27-2007, 03:27 AM | | I won't mind paying $35pm if, the host is reliable, provides 24x7 support and should be in business from atleast 3 - 4 years.
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-27-2007, 08:37 AM | | So far two people have asked how long it takes to recover our RAID. For anyone that thinks there is merit in that question, I will point out that we're running 4 drive RAID5s. One of our servers would have to lose 2 drives before it became unusable which is pretty darned uncommon.
If that unlikely event did occur we would break our downtime SLA, but there are remedies for that spelled out in our ToS.
I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say we have a great deal more backups than the weekly we advertise. That gives us a good deal of latitude in moving accounts of commissioning a whole new servers
Running a RAID5 is responsible and it offers a great deal of redundancy. Trying to make it sound like a weak link doesn't have a great deal of technical merit. I'll wager that we're the only host offering costs as low as we do that even attempts to RAID their drives or do offsite backups of their client's sites. In fact, I'm willing to bet that at least one price tier above us there are many hosts that are not RAIDed or backing up.
I do agree that there are some configurations of smaller disks that make sense for some hosts, but the very first part of my sentence was "Speaking as a budget seller and reseller...". Your pricing model allows for that type of hardware latitude whereas mine does not. That does not mean that my system is more likely to fail than yours or that I do not have contingency plans in place for if that happens.
A mass hardware failure can happen to anyone. All any of us can do is build a system that we feel is resilient and fits within our budget. Sounds like both of us have done that.
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-27-2007, 08:45 AM | | Because if I have 500 resellers overselling on my server I will most definitely wake up to a cratered server one day.
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| Posted by foobic, 04-27-2007, 09:17 AM | | 500 resellers on a single server? Good luck with that, whether overselling is enabled or not...
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-27-2007, 09:34 AM | | Laff...OK Mr. Literal.Pick whatever number you like. The point that you're missing is that allowing many people to sell however much bandwidth and disk they like on your server is a recipe for disaster IMHO. At least if *I* elect to oversell I have the advantage that I not only care about my server but I also know how many resources it still has available at any given point.
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| Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-27-2007, 12:39 PM | | Hi Hostpuppy,
I apologize if you took my comments as an attack. Everyone can configure their systems however they like, and there are merits to both ways (ie larger arrays = cheaper disk space and smaller arrays = faster recoveries). So, my only point was to comment on this statement you made:
So, I was just trying to point out that smaller drives arent necessarily "foolish" - and there are logical reasons to do so.
Also, to comment on your RAID5 and probability of failure. Well, I have seen 4 drives fail in one of our sans just last week (Thankfully with hot spares and RAID10 the array maintained integrity). We had also never seen a total raid failure in a server until recently. If we needed to recover 1+ TB of data, that server would have been down a long time - with our 73 GB drive configuration, it wasnt even a blip to our customers. Trust me when I tell you, hardware failures can will and do happen - even those you deem to be highly improbbable - and being prepared to recover from them in minutes vs days holds alot of value to alot of customers - so, not making any judgement - just trying to answer the original posters question - and that is - you can charge anywhere from $1 to $100+ for that package - it all depends on what level of overall service you are trying to offer and what market segment you are targetting.
Last edited by cartika-andrew; 04-27-2007 at 12:42 PM.
Reason: spelling
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-27-2007, 12:46 PM | | Heya
Yes, I was hasty in my "foolish" remark. I was thinking of a 1 or 2 80GB system which, for my model, would be a waste of time. You have outlined a valid reason to go with smaller drives.
I routinely see 1 drive fail in our NAS RAIDS (no, we're not using NASes for hosting, this is another project), but never two. I know it will happen one day and we're braced as best we can.
A 4 drive failure sounds more like a controller failure than the drives, no?
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| Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-27-2007, 12:49 PM | | Thats what we thought at first - but, no - just a bad batch of drives (8 out of 10 failed in this batch - needless to say, we pulled the other 2 from production and replaced them - call me paranoid )
All good
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| Posted by jonwatson, 04-27-2007, 12:52 PM | | Wow...that is some seriously bad luck (for you and for the manufacturer). Care to share the model/make?
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| Posted by cartika-andrew, 04-27-2007, 01:09 PM | | Sure, seagate cheetah 15k sas
for the record, we have hundreds of these and have never seen a failure - suddenly - wham ! bad batch...
Its not bad luck if you are prepared for it 8 failed drives resulted in 1 service being interrupted for under 1 hour. This is why I have been preaching that high availability is a strategy and it requires more then simply load balancing a couple of servers (as this alone does not even come close to making a HA strategy) - but, thats a conversation for another day
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| Posted by lochie, 04-27-2007, 04:15 PM | | o..k so we have discovered through my market reseach.. ask a simple question and get a whole lot of replies.. which is great. If only they were all answering my question!
Thanks for those that bothered to read my post and reply...
.. to the rest of you.. wtf? lol
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| Posted by foobic, 04-27-2007, 09:54 PM | | As one of the guilty parties, my apologies.
To answer the OP directly, I'd expect to pay from about $40 upwards for that spec from a quality host. If the account was "overselling-enabled" then I'd put the same value on an account with 5GB disk space, all other limits unchanged.
Of course much lower costs are available but with decreasing price I would expect increasingly overloaded servers and more downtime.
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| Posted by lochie, 04-28-2007, 07:49 AM | | Thanks Chris.. I appreciated your comments
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| Posted by looking4dedicated, 04-28-2007, 10:51 AM | | I've seen reseller packages offering all the bells and whistles for $10 (gazzin.com) - but they network is not that great with websites often going down. price does reflect what you get, so if you're offering a quality hosting you should also be asking for a higher price.
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