Reseller Hosting Accounts

Just received an email from Heart Internet to say their prices are going up by £5 a month to £39.99 + VAT. So I was wondering if there were any decent alternatives.

Should I be moving from Reseller Hosting to VPS with a control panel to host unlimited domains?

Should I just park all with Sedo?

 

There's plenty of better alternatives

You can get reseller hosting accounts that don't limit domains. Of course, a VPS does offer more flexibility but will end up costing more for a good spec one + cPanel. Do you have the technical skills to manage it and keep all the software up to date?

Re. Sedo (there's better parking options too) - what happens when you need to host a site?

Matt

 

TSO Host's cloud hosting is excellent

I have their 'ultimate' package which gives me up to 100 sites (for £17.99 a month inc vat, including a 10% discount (lots of codes floating around for this - mine is DOMAINOPTIONS (you have the option to sign up as an affiliate once you take a package with them)

You can purchase reseller functionality for an extra £10 (before discount) so all in all you've be paying £27 inc vat if you really want the reseller option...

Their control panel is custom designed and far superior to Cpanel in my opinion, much more user friendly and segregates the sites much better than CPanel if you choose not to have the reseller option (I hate the way CPanel makes you do 'extra' domains as an 'add on' domain, it's very clumsy and confusing)

https://www.tsohost.com/product/reseller-hosting

 

Just to clarify, the HI reseller account doesn't limit domains.

 

Are you happy where you are? If so is £5/month worth putting the effort of moving your sites?

VPS is nice in the fact that you control your "server", however, you also need to be able to manage a server if you are going to run a VPS safely & securely.

Beware of "unlimited" & "cheap" when looking for hosting!

 

I use www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk reseller account. £9.99 pcm + VAT. Unlimited EVERYTHING. UK based and support is absolutely second to none.

 

I would agree with this. I have 2 heart accounts and of course it is annoying to have price increases but over the years I have found them to be very reliable and their support to be very helpful and responsive.

I pay a year in advance for which they give you 2 months free so that may be worth considering.

Stephen.

 

Thanks for the advice Stephen, Alex and others!

I guess one of the considerations I was making is that I generally have one page sites with contact details to generate sales. If these pages are not generating enough sales, then it is a pure cost each month. Over the last few months, I've reduced the number of domains I have from around 400 to under 300, so the effort to move is reduced.

Is the effort worth the £5 per month (£60 per year), I guess not, but it is time to evaluate such things, as if there was another setup I could use which brought the costs down each month and I am saving more money, then it becomes a more attractive proposition.

I have to admit that Heart's support have been abosolutely fantastic, which is another thing to consider.

 

Not if you want to make some money!

As a domain buyer it devalues the domain a bit for me if I see it is parked like that.

 

I would think a normal hosting package that allows unlimited add on domains if all your doing is one page sites would be more cost effective could do what you want for around £80 per year looks like mdrussells offering such a deal as do many other hosts.

 

I signed up with HostDime.... £20 per month for a reseller account.

I've found them to be very reliable, and faster than when I had my Heart reseller account.

All websites are on the same IP though which is a real shame as Heart split their sites over 3 or 4 different class C networks.

 

When you get to a certain level - competence in understanding things like nameservers, dns etc - and a certain number of sites, then it makes sense to move to a vps. Preferably one running cpanel/whm unless you're a hardcore techie.

It's one step up from a reseller and will give you root access to the server, which is essential if you really want to optimise & speed it up with an optimised apache/mysql config and things like an opcache for php e.g. XCache. Makes a massive difference.

No recommendations. They're all very much alike these days with a similar setup. In saying that I'll be using one from memset in the near future for a standalone ecommerce project.

 

I can't agree with price hikes for customers or the justification behind doing so. The cost of providing services is not increasing. Yes, electricity is always getting more expensive but this is offset by cheaper bandwidth pricing and better server density.

Migrating away is not particularly difficult as most providers offer a free transfer/migration service.

However, if everything bar the price is good and you are happy, I'd be inclined to stay put for the sake of £5/month.

I agree that VPS is a step up from Reseller Hosting but there are some important consideration points.

- You are responsible for the server in a self-managed/unmanaged environment. This does require a good amount of technical expertise. Yes, a good control panel like cPanel/WHM will help you in managing the server but you need to understand at least the basics for it to run smoothly. Alternatively, choose a managed VPS or a managed addon to get the host's tech team to run it for you.

- All VPSes are not created equal. Yes, there are a number of good providers out there but there's a higher number of bad providers.

You want a VPS provider that is using top of the line hardware. Enterprise RAID hard drives are a must. A good amount of memory is a must. RAID with a BBU is a must. And it's nice for all of that to be from a good brand (Dell / HP / Supermicro) so you are assured of its build quality.

I have seen many datacentres in my time and I've seen a lot of "VPS Hypervisors" that are basically crapped out desktop machines with a bit of RAM, a single hard drive and 100 VMs loaded on them. Then pushed out on lowendtalk for $5 per month and sold as a VPS. Your neighbours on a service like this are likely to be running proxies, scraping scripts and all kinds of stuff you want to stay away from.

 

Matt. Agree with the VPS synopsis. Probably why I 'sort of' recommended memset.

Curious who you'd recommend atm for linux vps, which os (debian / ubuntu / centos ) and which vps methodology ( xen, virtuozzo etc)

S

 

Hehe

It pains me that some of the really low end guys claim to have a resilient system when we spend around £4k / $6k on each hypervisor node just to deliver a reliable high-performance environment.

As you may have guessed from above, I am a big cPanel fan. I've used cPanel for 10 years and both individually and as a business we have a great relationship with them. This means bug reports / feature requests / support for obscure problems is all dealt with very speedily and I'm very hesitant to look elsewhere. As a cp, cPanel definitely favours CentOS so that gets my vote.

We don't use Virtuozzo. We have some legacy stuff on OpenVZ which is fine as a lower end virutualisation technology, so long as you don't massively oversell it and use it with CentOS 6.

Our newest stuff (US only at this moment in time) is all OnApp/KVM based. We're happy with the performance, stability and functionality it offers.

Matt

 

Prices pretty much everywhere else are not increasing like they appear to do so in the uk ? Always found uk based companies such a rip off compared to the rest of the world is it more expensive setting up a center in Manchester, Liverpool etc or whatever back water they find than anywhere else in the world..? and if so why can you often go to a US company with uk based servers often same locations cheaper than uk ones ?

The service offered by many is often lousy yes things do go wrong out of the standard 9-5 mon to fri or the classic email support loop? I’d go outside uk ones with uk based server if you believe it affects seo etc. Wouldn’t even consider ones that don’t offer live support 24 .7 be it online or phone (not the money grabing 0845 etc types yes really who don't have a mobile or care about non local rates) Also try them out prior ask them technical questions) If they can’t be arsed prior to getting your money imagine how helpful they’ll be when they have it..?

 

The fundamental main difference in cost is power. Our bandwidth costs in the UK are perhaps 20% higher than our costs in the US. But if we look at power, in Atlanta we pay $21 per Amp (@208V) for Tier IV delivered power.

In the UK for power, delivered on a similar level of redundancy, we pay around £60 per Amp (~230V). Call it $100 exchange rate dependent and its 5x higher.

Hardware costs are somewhat higher but good deals can be found. There is also no import duty on servers/networking equipment right now (only VAT) and the cost difference on stuff like 10 Gig network gear was so significant that it made sense shipping it over from the US.

Our approach has been exactly what you've cited though. I know that our service is far better than many of the legacy UK hosts but building brand awareness is a long-term challenge

 

I've been with futurehosting.com for a couple of years now and their service is outstanding and it's priced in $ with servers in the UK, got to love those exchange rates.

I also can't recall a single piece of downtime and the hosting is lightning quick