If you deal with web hosting reselling you might have thought of different solutions that would bring you more clients while spending less funds to attract them. If you did, you must have definitely considered affiliate marketing as one of the most appropriate tools. Well, it really is, if you analyze the way it works. The thing is that this client attraction strategy requires minimum of preliminary investments. Whether you are going to place your advertising banners on some popular relevant websites or run a Google Adwords campaign, it means you will give out your money for a chance to attract more customers or partners. But what if your company cannot afford such investments that don’t grant 100% results while your service is really worth being promoted? That’s where affiliate marketing can help – you cooperate with partners, who help you promote your company and reward them for bringing you signups. A nice and promising strategy, isn’t it? Let us take a closer look.

How Affiliate Marketing Works in Web Hosting

Those who deal with web hosting usually call it an affiliate or partner program. To put it simple – hosting providers grant their affiliates rewards (commissions) for sales made by clients they refer. Affiliates may link their websites to the website of a hosting provider by placing special affiliate banners or hyperlinking URLs in some text adverts, testimonials or reviews, referring their visitors to you this way. As far as you can see it works the same way banner placement does, but you needn’t pay upfront. Of course it is vital to stay tuned and control all those referred sales and those who helped make them. And it’s rather easy to do that – you simply need to get some affiliate tracking software and integrate it into your billing system. This is going to let you know a) which sale was made; b) who made this sale and c) which affiliate referred it.

Such software usually has a full set of tools, so it will help you not only define the lucky affiliate, but also set a commission rate that is going to be his or her reward and set payout interval and minimal withdrawal sum. Additionally those systems usually support multi-level commissions, performance bonuses and other helpful tools. Another advantage of those systems is their client side that allows affiliates check their accounts and stay updated on their status – if they have any pending commissions, if they reached their withdrawal minimum or another level, etc. Finally, some types of affiliate software allow uploading banners and creating links, binding them to the ID of the specific affiliate, making tracking easier.

When a prospect client clicks the affiliate link the affiliate software tracks the date, the IP address of the referral and places the cookie of the page where they were referred from. The IP address and the cookie are tracked by the software database along with the name of the affiliate of affiliate ID. When the client finally buys some hosting package, the software will check the current data and match it with the data in the database. This allows identifying the affiliate who will be rewarded the commission.

This customer attraction strategy looks really simple and profitable – you give away a certain amount of a sure made sale as a commission, showing your appreciation and stimulating your affiliate to help you make more sales. Level or performance rewards system is going to work as a great stimulating factor and may significantly increase both the signups and common interest to your service, even if you have a few relevant and dedicated affiliates.

Organizing Your Affiliate Program

Being a hosting provider you should always be attentive to your clients. If you run an affiliate program, you are also attentive to your partners. No, your partners should not obligatory be your clients. Although a happy customer of yours may be the best advertisement for your business, there are many owners of well-visited relevant or just popular websites. And it doesn’t actually matter if they are hosted with you or not – don’t lose them. If they are interested in cooperation with you, welcome them to join your program – you will be surprised with the number of sale they may make.

Talking about attention and care we can’t leave policies unmentioned. Yes, no matter how simple your affiliate program is or looks like, you need to have everything confirmed and approved by a policy, better followed by Terms and Conditions. Such minor issues like sales made from a different IP address or after cookies removal may look pretty harmless… unless your affiliate demands to pay him or her this untracked (or unreal) commission. Policies may also be useful if your have a minimal withdrawal point and/or make delayed payouts (advisable method, so that you shouldn’t accept commissions for orders that were cancelled with refund).

According to the proverb – honesty is the best policy, so apart from creating papers you should also confirm them by your actions. Monitor sales and commissions, check their status and don’t ignore any complaints or support requests of your affiliates. If you prove yourself as a trusted hosting provider and reliable partner, you are likely to get tier affiliates – your affiliates will attract other people to become your partners.

Conclusion

If you run your hosting company and you feel like lacking signups – give it a try – start your affiliate program and watch new clients and new partners becoming a part of your business. If you are a blogger or an administrator of a busy forum or just an owner of an interesting and popular website who feels like making some more money with a trusted host – join affiliate program at Sitevalley.com.

Updated commissions and new payout system coming in 2011.

If you have your hosting business you have to take care of every single detail concerning your team, your hardware, your clients… and their billing. Today however, we are not going to talk about invoicing, transaction tracking or fraud control – our article is dedicated to money back guarantee.

Frankly speaking being a web hosting provider you are not obliged to have this policy and you may not offer money back with any of your services. On the other hand, offering money back may help your customers build trust in your company and the service you provide, which is a very important factor for attracting new sales.

Attracting Customers

Though it may look not very clear at first sight, offering money back does help attracting customers. Namely it increases the trust of the potential clients to you and your business. This works especially good for those hosting packages that use some new technologies – VPS servers, cloud hosting, etc. – or special hosting plans designed for hosting of particular software, e.g. blog hosting or e-commerce hosting. Even if there’s nothing special about the packages you offer, the money back guarantee is going to make your business look more serious and reliable.

Handling Billing

Although guaranteeing unconditional money back puts you under the risk of losing some funds, it secures you from a greater risk of losing even more funds in less fair way. We can’t say there were a lot of such cases but almost every host might have faced troubles with unexpected chargebacks and transaction disputes. The problem with those is not only about the fact you have to give back the money you earned on fair service provision, the problem is that you pay an additional chargeback fee that may make about $30 – $100 and even more sometimes.

Offering a money back guarantee lessens those risks much. As far as you know, hosting services require subscription and usually imply some funds being transferred upfront. By default the customer can have his or her transaction disputed within 6 month. If your hosting package has a minimal billing cycle of a year, it’s going to be 1.5 years – hardly a nice prospect for your business. A money back guarantee is something that is going to define the legal period for cost recovery, which means that even if a chargeback is requested, you have more arguments to dispute it and have it denied.

Tips and Tricks

Now you know why you need a money back guarantee. Let us find out which exactly way you need it to be offered. Below you will find some tips that are going to help not only hosting providers but regular clients as well. The former will learn which conditions it is advisable to offer money back on, while the latter will understand, what their providers mean by money back policy and how those policies work. This in turn is going to let the prospective clients make their choice with more trust and conscious.

First things first you need to create a policy. The clearer the policy is, the less misunderstandings you are going to have. One of the important points to consider is the money back period. Not only the time period should be fixed, but the starting point should be as well. The most recommended term to use is “XX days after initial signup” those three words disable money back guarantee for renewals or upgrades/downgrades. Another thing to take care of is the product you guarantee cost recovery for. If your client bought a hosting package and then a domain and/or a dedicated IP address along, while you refund only hosting packages – you should clearly mention it in your policy. If some services of yours do not include money back – state this, listing all packages this term concerns. The last but not least is the amount of funds to return – if your merchant takes some commission for reverse transfers, don’t leave this unmentioned. Otherwise you risk confusing your clients who are waiting for full cost recovery.

If you didn’t offer money back before – you now have reasons to start thinking of implementing it. Do it and watch more clients signing up for your services with more trust and pleasure. Apart from it you will secure your business from unfair actions of some customers, who we wish you never have. In case you are only looking into starting your own hosting business, check out our VPS hosting packages or dedicated servers – those are going to be a good launch pad for your own hosting company. Money back included

You must remember us publishing a comparative review on WHMCS and WHMAP billing software. Well, if you do, you might be interested in reading this one, since today we are going to check out a few panels more. The very idea of this review is to compare several different billing scripts that may be helpful while starting your own hosting business. No matter whether you are going to resell hosting or run an independent hosting company, you will definitely need a billing system to manage your customers. Our former review was aimed at highlighting the main advantages of the two most popular scripts – WHM Auto Pilot and WHM Complete Solution – for resellers, since those are commonly used by many hosts and provided to their partners. This review is going to reveal the peculiarities of several more billing panels, which are quite competitive but less popular.

OVERVIEW

While picking three other panels to compare with WHMCS and WHMAP we first of all kept rating, usability and functionality in mind. Thus, we are going to compare WHMAP, WHMCS, Parallels Plesk Billing, AWBS (Advanced Webhosting Billing System) and ClientExec. Before we start providing the details and revealing peculiarities, let us deliver some general information on each script.

WHM AutoPilot (WHMAP) was initially designed for use with cPanel/WHM hosting control panel. Being cPanel hosting oriented, this billing software became very popular since it was easy to comprehend and integrate and supported entire cPanel functionality. Though WHMAP has never been developed to support multiple control panels, currently it can also be integrated into Parallels Plesk Control Panel, which popularity gained a significant increase lately.

WHMAP Admin/Client View

WHM Complete Solution (WHMCS) – unlike WHMAP, this billing software covers a wide range of features, allowing its user to use one system for many purposes. Founded in 2005 (3 years later after WHMAP was introduced) and designed for cPanel/WHM integration, WHMCS project continued developing and by now supports several control panels and domain registrars to handle all hosting related operations.

WHMCS Admin/Client View

Parallels Plesk Billing is a relatively new product that burst into software market after Parallels, Inc. acquired ModernGigabyte, LLC in January 2008. The initial product was called ModernBill and was rather popular. Rebranding of ModernBill did not just touch the name and the outlook of this billing script – Parallels’ developers got it completely optimized and enriched the functionality of the former ModernBill system.

Parallels Plesk Billing Admin/Client View

Advanced Webhosting Billing System (AWBS) has been officially released in April, 2005. Some hosting gurus may remember it under the name of DRAMS, which first release was let out in January, 2004 and became a nice competitive alternative to ModernBill, launched in late 2001.

AWBS Admin/Client View

ClientExec is a billing system introduced in 2003. This one was developed with maximum convenience in mind, since ClientExec project began as a hosting company in 1996 and its founders knew for sure, what hosts and their clients want. Currently this software offers one of the most feature rich systems for hosting business management.

ClientExec Admin/Client View

BILLING SYSTEMS COMPARISON

Before we start comparing those five scripts, it is fair enough to mention, that the range of supported features makes each billing system unique and hard to evaluate equally. Additionally, the choice of a billing system depends on the user’s needs and hosting server configuration. Thus, we are going to provide such details as supported options and features, integration options, installation requirements and license details. This review is absolutely independent so the main goal we set is to reveal as many peculiarities of each system as possible to let our readers choose on their own. Well, here we go.

FEATURES

In order not to waste time on listing default “pure billing” features each system has, let us name them upfront. Those are:

• Automated account creation;
• Account status management (upgrades, suspension/unsuspension);
• Admin/client-end record management (including new orders issuing/placement)
• System notifications delivery;
• Support of multiple orders under one record;
• Multiple billing cycles support;
• Packages and discounts management;
• Fraud screening tools;
• Website and control panel redirection.

When you study features offered by WHMAP, you can see that it is entirely tuned-up for hosting services provision. Apart from the general functionality AutoPilot offers:

• Google E-commerce Tracking;
• Gateway throttling;
• “Free” domain option.

Those options show that the client management gets totally simplified for the hosting business owner. Provision of “free” products (not only domains), for instance, has always been a pain in the neck for administrators, since it required a creation of “zero” invoice which implied needless updates – you had to clear a $0.00 invoice each time it is supposed to become due for renewal. WHMAP team got this resolved.

WHMCS developers did really aim at creation of a complete solution, which was supposed to cover not only the billing aspect, but also the entire client management side. Well, they succeeded:

• “Free” product option;
• Integrated ticket system;
• Knowledgebase with downloadable content;
• Announcements;
• System and support messages view;
• Selective notification tool.

Omitting the first option, all the other ones make WHMCS a rocking out competitor that may draw some AutoPilot users away. Those, who are keen on complete automation and rational information use, may find WHMCS way more convenient for their business. The system does not only allow to send announcements, but also publish them on the website as news. All notifications are tracked, so you can always check what system and ticket messages were sent to your client. Additionally, one of the numerous loadable addons, this script has allows to deliver newsletters – this may come in handy for a socially active user-friendly host.

Parallels Plesk Billing script is something you have to get acquainted with first. It looks like the simplest billing system at first glance and their website does not even say it supports some outstanding features, but when you get a closer look… The first and the most fair remark is that you need to be a Parallels control panel user to feel all the advantages of that billing system. Another remark is about the business, you are going to run – the thing is that Plesk product can be used for ISP billing, too. Therefore, if you are an associate of your local ISP and you wish to use your platforms for web hosting – you can handle all your clients – both the Internet users and website owners using one powerful script.

AWBS feature list may look similar to the one of WHMCS:

• “Free” products;
• Integrated helpdesk and knowledgebase;
• Contact form and contact form submission management.

However, there are some other features, this billing system may be proud of:

• Full tax support (VAT and tax inclusive pricing);
• SEO package sales.

The two latter options are very interesting. Many hosting services used to include different addons to their packages – free domains and SSL certificates have always been the most popular products that come along with the hosting package. Now there is one more “free” product – SEO package. It may include Google Adwords credits or vouchers and is often offered with business hosting and e-commerce hosting packages.

ClientExec billing system is said to be one of the most rigid WHMCS competitors. Its developers did all their best to make ClientExec look an “even more complete” solution. Apart from the built-in ticket system, it has an optimized intranet solution. Let’s take a closer look at what they offer:

• partial payments;
• taxes (VAT included);
• “powerful helpdesk” (routing rules, escalation and knowledgebase);
• email parser (creation of tickets from email messages);
• representatives’ status and file exchange;
• staff-to-staff chat, file exchange.

The two last but not least features is what we meant by intranet solution. If your team members are located in different offices or even countries, such online tool with a common database is going to make communication and team management a lot easier. The other features seem to allow ClientExec users carry out billing and customer support tasks in a better way, than any other billing software with integrated helpdesk.

INTEGRATION OPTIONS

While reviewing the features, offered by those five billing systems, we talked about helpdesk and other modules integration much. The main feature of such software, however, is its own ability to be integrated into a bigger system. Let us see, which hosting control panels, domain registrars and payment gateways those scripts support.

CONTROL PANELS

WHMAP – Made with native cPanel/WHM support in mind, AutoPilot developers made only one extension step – added Plesk hosting panel integration option. Although this software is developer-friendly and WHMAP support team appreciates 3rd party modules, control panels are their weak point.

WHMCS also started as a cPanel-oriented system. By now it supports numerous control panels. Those are:

cPanel/WHM

DirectAdmin

Plesk

Helm (v.3 and v.4)

Ensim

InterWorx

DotNetPanel

Lxadmin

Virtualmin Pro

Additionally, you can get a loadable module for any control panel you wish.

Parallels Plesk Billing has a wider range of supported control panels, since it’s a modular product. Thus, the question of compatibility is resolved via installation of a needed module:

cPanel/WHM

DirectAdmin

Virtuozzo

Mod-ModernBill

HSphere

Ensim (+EnsimUnify)

Plesk (both for Linux and Windows)

Plesk Expand

FreeRadius

InterWorx

Cortex

Hostopia

eNom (eNomHost and eNom Exchange)

Helm

AWBS – another modular product – has probably the biggest number of supported panels. Apart from those below, you can have a module for any other control panel, since AWBS comes with a DevKit – a tool for 3rd party modules developers.

Cast Control

Centovacast

Cloudmin

CPanel/WHM (version 11+)

DirectAdmin

DotNetPanel 2.x

Enom’s Hosting

Ensim (Linux only)

Plesk (Windows and Linux)

Helm Windows (v3.2.3+)

Hostopia

HurricaneHost

Hypervm

InterWorx (v1.8.1+)

ISP Manager

Lxadmin (Kloxo)

Solus VM

TCAdmin

Teamspeak (v2.x and v3.x)

VDS Manager

Virtualmin Pro Edition

WhmPHPNew!

WHMSonic

Zervex ServerCP

As far as you can see, AWBS supports not only hosting control panels, but virtual and dedicated server management panels as well.

ClientExec. This billing system also supports many panels and also owing to plug-in integration. So far there are the following plug-ins available:

cPanel/WHM

Plesk

DirectAdmin

TCAdmin

HyperVM

Teamspeak (+Teamspeak 3)

License Defender

ISPManager

InterWorx-CP

Teamspeak

WHMSonic

DOMAIN REGISTRARS

WHMAP. Another thing this system is poor in is support of domain registrars. Enom and OpenSRS are the only ones that are supported by default. All the others registrars’ API keys can be submitted for consideration to AutoPilot support. Otherwise, you can create another task for your developer, but regardless of the steps you make – all of them take much time.

WHMCS is the one that simply dominates the niche with 21 registrars supported:

Enom

ResellerClub/DirectI

Nominet

OpenSRS

ResellOne

OnlineNIC

PlanetDomain

DistributeIT

TPPInternet

RegisterFly

StarGate

NameCheap

NetEarthOne

12Register

Register.com

IPMirror

DotDNS

WebNIC

InternetBS

NetRegistry

Bizcn

Parallels Plesk Billing does not have any registrars modules preinstalled. There is, however, a list of modules available for manual installation:

Distributeit

Dotster

Enom

Eurodns

Internetx

Ispproxy

Namecheap

Nominet

Opensrs

Registercom

ResellOne

AWBS also has a nice feature list:

Dot TK DomainShare

Enom.com

Hexonet/Ispapi

Internet.bs

IRRP.Net/ispproxy.com

NetEarth One

Nokta TK

Nominet EPP

Onlinenic

OpenSRS.net

Reg.ru

RegisterFly.com

Resellerclub (LogicBox systems)

Resell One

Generic Module

And again, the DevKit is provided for additional modules creation.

ClientExec may seem to be not that rich in this option, but is definitely supporting a wide range of the most popular registrars:

Directi Enom

OpenSRS

PlanetDomain

ResellOne

OnlineNIC

Realtime Register

PAYMENT GATEWAYS

One of the vital usability aspects for a billing system is gateway support. And that’s where the WHMAP product does not fall behind:

Authorize.NET

LinkPoint.com

USAePay

BluePay

CyberSource

PayLane

PSiGate

CDGCommerce

PayPal

2Checkout INS

Google Checkout

BluePay

CyberSource

eWay

eGold

2Checkout Standard

StormPay

NoChex

CyberSource

WHMCS dominates the niche also with 60 gateways:

PayPal

2Checkout

Google Checkout

Quantum Gateway Vault

Authorize.net

BluePay

ProtX/SagePay

WorldPay FuturePay/Invisible

Payflow Pro

Website Payments Pro

AlertPay

AsiaPay

Bank Transfer

BidPay

Boleto

Camtech

CashU

CCAvenue

Chronopay

E-Gold

E-path

eProcessingNetwork

eWay

F2B

Fasthosts

Finans Bank

Garanti Bank

Gate2Shop

iDeal

InternetSecure

IP Pay

Liberty Reserve

LinkPoint

Mail In Payment

Merchant Partners

Moneris

Moneybookers

Navigate

Netbilling

NoChex

NTPNow

Offline Credit Card

OpenECHO

Optimal Payments

Pagseguro

PayJunction

Paymate AU/NZ

Payment Express

Paymex

Pay Offline

Payson

PlanetAuthorize

SagePay VSPForm

PSiGate

SecPay

SecurePay

StormPay

Trust Commerce

USAePay

WorldPay

Parallels Plesk Billing offers a not that wide range of gateways, but many of them are alternate:

LinkPoint

Velocity Pay

InternetSecure

WorldPay

Quantum

BluePay

eWay

Authorize.net

Moneris

PayFlowPro

PayPal

PSIGate

ProTX

Echo Inc.

SecurePay US

SecurePay

AWBS takes the second place with its 35 gateways (and a DevKit for custom modules, of course):

2Checkout

Alert Pay

Authorizenet (AIM)

Bluepay

BRPay (Pagseguro)

Cajamar

Cardia

CCAvenue

CDGCommerce

Chronopay

Echo

EFT Secure

E-Gold

Eprocessing Network

Eway

Google Checkout

Innovative Gateway

LinkPoint

Firepay

Moneybookers

MultiSafepay

Netbilling

NoChex

Pagamento Digital

Paypal (Paypal Pro & Paypal IPN)

Paypal Payflow Pro

Paysystems

Planetauthorize

ProTX (Sagepay)

PSIGate

Stormpay

Webmoney

Worldpay (+Worldpay Invisible)

Verus

Manual CC Processing

ClientExec offers plug-ins for the most popular gateways. Additionally, they provide four offline plug-ins that may be helpful for remote billing operators. The full list can be seen below:

PayPal & PayPal Pro

Google Checkout

Authorize.Net

BluePay

CCAvenue

ChronoPay

Quantum Gateway

e-gold

Internet Secure

World Pay

StormPay

PsiGate

Protx

eWay

Money Bookers

2Checkout

eProcessingNetwork

LinkPoint

Check (offline plugin)

Money Order (offline plugin)

Bank Transfer (offline plugin)

Credit Card (offline plugin)

INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS

All five panels are actually similar in their system requirements. Their general requirements are OS Linux (some systems can run on Windows-based servers, too), PHP and MySQL database support. More details on each panel can be found below.

WHMAP

• UNIX / Linux Operation System
• Zend Optimizer v3.x (or higher)
• PHP Version 4.4.x or newer (including PHP v5.1.x)
• cURL with SSL Support
• Mcrypt
• MySQL Version 4.0.22 or higher (including MySQL 5x)

WHMCS

• Windows or Linux OS
• PHP Version 5.x or later
• MySQL Version 4.1.x or later (Strict Mode Disabled)
• Curl Support (with SSL)
• GD Image Library
• Ioncube Loaders

Parallels Plesk Billing

• Windows or Linux OS
• Apache (for Linux and FreeBSD).
• IIS (for Windows), running PHP in CGI/FastCGI mode (ISAPI is not supported)
• PHP 5.1.6 or higher. (curl, gd, mysql, openssl, pcre, pdo, xml, zlib modules required)
• MySQL 4.0.11 or higher.
• Zend Optimizer 3.3.3+ or IonCube Loaders 3.1.32 +

AWBS

• Linux/FreeBSD/Windows2003
• PHP v5.0.x and 5.3.x
• MySQL Database Server v4.x-5.x
• Apache or IIS5/6 Web Server
• Curl + SSL v7.10 or better (php compiled Curl required)
• Ability to setup CRON jobs or scheduled tasks
• Ability to setup password protected directories. (.htaccess)
• Secure site (optional)(no cross domain secure URLs)
• Compiled GD with freetype support needed for human verification system and reports.
• Compiled MB String with Mbregex.

ClientExec

• OS Linux
• MySQL 4.1x and up
• PHP from 5.2 and up
• GD integration with PHP for report graphs support
• ionCube loader or Zend
• mcrypt for credit card transactions using your own cc
• cURL with ssl integration for some control panel plugins and credit card transactions

LICENSE DETAILS

Now, when we are almost done with all features comparison, it’s high time to reveal the details of licensing and pricing. Each billing system, except for Parallels, offers two types of licenses – Lease and Owned ones – Plesk Billing can be only leased. Apart from this, their licenses differ by accounts limit.

WHMAP is the one that has no limits (except for their “Free Version” with limited support and 10 accounts allowed). The pricing for the others is as follows:

• Version 2.x (Leased) – $14.95/mo (unlimited support)
• Version 3.x (Leased) – $19.95/mo (unlimited support)
• Version 3.x (Owned) – $199.95 (one-time; requires semi-annual support renewal for $19.95/mo)
• Promo Version 3.x (Owned) Lifetime – $99.95 (one-time; unlimited lifetime support)

WHMCS are not that generous and apply additional fee for the brandable version of their product:

• Monthly Lease $15.95/mo
• Monthly Lease (No Branding) $18.95/mo
• Owned License $249.95 (one-time)
• Owned License (No Branding) $324.95 (one-time)

Parallels Plesk Billing has a stricter licensing strategy – they neither provide unlimited accounts, nor include support into license price:

• Parallels Plesk Billing for 50 Accounts – $24.95/mo
• Parallels Plesk Billing for 1000 Accounts – $49.99/mo

If purchased along with Plesk control panel with unlimited domains (with initial cost of $70.00/mo), you can get both products for a lower price – $107.99/mo.

AWBS product is offered for a reasonable price; additionally they have a nice discount system:

• AWBS Hosting Edition $169.00 (one-time)
• AWBS Leased License $17.95/mo
• AWBS Additional License $149.00 (one-time; for current AWBS/DRAMS Plus owners)
• AWBS Leased License – Annual Term $203.40/yr

ClientExec licenses come with different support options. Additionally they have a so-called “Refugee Offer” that gives a 25% discount on any license if the user switches from another billing panel. Their initial prices are:

• Leased License $15.95/mo
• Owned License $199.99 (one-time)

Summary

If you want to start your own reseller business, you need to have the client management and billing aspect secured. Thus, you are going to need a billing system that allows you to automate as many processes as possible. On the other hand, you will definitely want this solution to be not costly, especially if you are only starting your hosting business. Thus, depending on your needs, server capabilities (vital, if you are a reseller) and budget, you may choose one of the following options:

WHMAP is the simplest and cheapest solution with minimal functionality; maybe the best option for a reseller.

WHMCS – full-featured system for a reasonable price. Not resource intensive and fitting to almost any type of hosting servers to run it. Supports 3rd party loadable modules.

Parallels Plesk Billing – rich in billing features, but reasonable for use only with Parallels Plesk hosting control panel. The only system it takes over is WHMAP… if you don’t check their pricing.

AWBS – a nice WHMCS alternative available at a lower cost. Allows modules customization.

ClientExec – a feature-rich system with outstanding support and project management options. Another cheaper WHMCS alternative.

We hope you find this article useful and it will help you with making your choice. If you have your own opinion to share or would like to rate those panels in the way, you like – feel free to join the discussion at our Facebook.

Starting reseller business five years ago or earlier the business owner had only two options: signup for a shared hosting account with reselling feature or order a dedicated server. The initial option was a fine solution for starters since it was cheap, but as soon as the resellers’ business developed they needed a step-up. The problem however was that a dedicated server was still not affordable for them, while the resource usage of both resellers’ and their resold accounts became completely unbearable for a standard shared servers. This led to continuous suspensions of accounts and constant quarrels, some of which were even brought to social media. Finally, either the hosting company met halfway with the reseller offering some discount on upgrade or the reseller quit the company to signup for another shared hosting plan with another host. A lot has changed since VPS hosting has been introduced, so nowadays hosting reselling is not that tough, expensive and risky business.

What is a VPS and How It Works?

A VPS is a Virtual Private Server – an isolated virtualized environment with its own OS (Operating System) and emulated hardware, hosted on a physical server a.k.a. carrier. Those virtual servers are setup within a carrier by means of virtualization technology, which allows to run several isolated boxes, letting them operate independently from each other and provide the performance rates, similar to the ones of a dedicated server. Though there are several virtualization technologies, the common idea implied in all of them is to create conditions, on which several operating systems could function within single hardware set – one physical machine. There are many backgrounds for such an idea – energy use reduction, hardware use optimization, setup and maintenance cost cutting, etc. The main thing is that this idea works well for many business solutions including hosting reselling – let’s take a closer look, at which aspects specifically.

Reasonable Price

An upgrade from a shared reseller plan to a VPS or initial start of reseller business on a virtual server is quite an affordable solution, since it sets the business owners free from enormous expenses of hosting. Resellers can then invest their money into SEO and social media marketing to have their business promoted on the World Wide Web. Apart from just being a good fund saving solution, a VPS stimulates the reseller to fair pricing formation. This is one of the key points in this business, since, on the one hand, there are too many competitors, while on the other hand – spending much money on expensive hosting may force the reseller to set high prices, too high prices for the provided services.

Smooth Upgrades

Taking into account the further growth of their business, resellers may need the further upgrade of their VPS. The virtualization technology allows performing such upgrades staying on the same server, by just increasing the resource usage quotas – to some extent of course. Thus, since VPS hosting providers usually offer 3-5 different plans, a reseller may have his or her virtual machine upgraded to a couple of levels higher. Such upgrades are very convenient as long as they cause no downtime, which is critical for resellers and their clients.

Master Reselling

The feature of master reseller plans provision – plans which allow reseller’s customers to resell hosting, too – was usually available for the dedicated server users only. Modern technology allows to offer such plans on a VPS. Of course, this solution requires a more powerful VPS, but the fact is that resellers can now provide reseller hosting on their own with less expenses involved.

Virtual Hardware Makes No Real Issues

One of the main benefits of VPS hosting is the absence of hardware issues. This point is the most essential for resellers. If the hosting reselling business owner is using a shared server and this server crashes, a reseller depends on his/her hosting provider, who in turn depends on datacenter staff. As far as such issues may take long to get resolved, a terrific waste of time may cause resellers to lose their customers. If it is a dedicated server, the issue may take less time but more money (e.g. if there’s no SLA guarantee, if the server is purchased from the datacenter directly, etc.). Being hosted on a VPS a reseller is set free from any possible hardware issues, except for those which may happen to the carrier. In this case, however a Virtual Machine can be cloned and moved and then started on the backup server.

Server Management

Performance is not the only feature of the VPS, which makes it look similar to a dedicated server. Another feature is management. Administration of the server does take much time. If there are a couple of dozens accounts hosted there, administration and management of such a server may become a nightmare. Those who were using a shared reseller hosting account can tell how exhaustive it can be – to just manage clients’ accounts and billing. Imagine what it would be if they also had to administrate the server itself. Well, you may not imagine this – virtual servers are administrated by the host’s technical staff.

Another positive thing about VPS management is the client side. Let us refer to shared reseller hosting users again – I believe all of them can confirm they had a situation, when they requested assistance for their customers, even on their behalf and received a deny. This may sound fair enough from the host’s side in terms of support provision policies or taking the fact the server is shared and is used by many other people and so on, but the problem remains and the reseller’s client stays unsatisfied. Use of a VPS helps to resolve such issues quite well. First of all, a VPS is one of the top products at many companies; therefore its support is privileged. Another point is server isolation – it allows the host’s support team to modify initial server configuration and apply non-standard solutions. As a result – the reseller can take care of many other things important for his or her business.

Customizability

Another advantage of a Virtual Private Server for a reseller is the ability to customize it. The isolatability of the VPS and the presence of root access to it allow the reseller to tune-up and reconfigure different services, what helps minimizing load and cut server resource usage. Considering the constant lack of disk space and taking into account active file transfer and mail exchange, such option may do much good to both reseller and all his or her clients, since a couple of resource intensive accounts may make other account owners and the entire VPS experience services slowdown and even overload. For instance, a reseller may limit the number of FTP and SMTP/IMAP connections to the server to lessen the number of request and the load on those services, in turn. Furthermore, the administrator of the VPS may simply disable IMAP protocol on the server, so that all the users could use only POP3, which implies the download of all messages to the local computer of the user. Such limitation helps saving server space and gives the reseller a ticket to overselling.

Overselling

Overselling is actually not the best strategy, but many hosting business owners apply it while creating their hosting packages and setting prices for provided services. In a nut-shell, this strategy means offering and selling more, than one really has. This mostly concerns disk space and bandwidth quotas, but hosting sellers and resellers usually oversell on more services – number of virtual hosts (addon and subdomains), email and FTP-accounts number, size and number of the databases allowed under a single account. Though overselling strategy does not always bring many problems, the risk of slowdowns and overloads may grow with its use. Thus, if the hosting business owner considers this solution important for his/her business, overselling may be applied. The reseller however should make sure the server in use is capable of carrying out such loads.

Modularity

The problem of load and its reduction has always been in question for all server administrators. Even for those who use their server resources rationally. The solution to this problem was found since the load balancing technology had been invented. This technology requires the use of several servers – each of them is processing requests addressed to a service or a set of services specifically configured on this standalone machine. Load balancing may look an expensive solution, but its price is justified by the positive effect it makes. Additionally, talking about separate machine for service processing, we mean virtual machines, too. Those are significantly cheaper, as far as you know, so let us see how resellers can have load balancing applied in their business.

Imagine you have a top VPS. To make the story more interesting, imagine that you oversell and already have about 50 clients. You start experiencing load issues because some host over 20 domains; some use your service as a small email server and some organize file sharing over FTP. Such load is bearable yet, but you realize that the further growth of your business may require an upgrade – this time to a dedicated server. You are definitely not interested in wasting time on transfers, DNS-rearrangement and other related problems. Thus, you get a couple of simplest cheaper virtual servers, one of which is let’s say set to process MySQL requests, while another deals with mail exchange. Even such move is going to seriously lessen the load on your VPS.

Summary

The development of the reseller’s business may later require an upgrade to a more serious solution – to a dedicated server. A finely tuned VPS however can let a reseller host his resold accounts for a long time with no issues and for a significantly affordable price. If you are not sure about what hosting plan to choose to start your reseller campaign – order a VPS and start seizing the market of web hosting.

Many of web hosting newbies bring up a question about differences between a reseller hosting and a VPS and wondering which one is best for their project needs. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to answer this question. There is a number of touches that require a closer investigation on the subject to give a decent answer. First of all, a lot depends on the initial aim, i.e. whether the account will be used to resell hosting, utilized directly to host own content, used as a test ground for products in development or all at once. Moreover, Skills possessed by an owner of an account matter a lot as well as the price differences. Let’s take a closer look at both hosting types to draw reasonable conclusions…

Shared Reseller Hosting Plans

Reseller hosting is a variation of a shared hosting, which in turn is a kind of a budget solution for those who are just starting off or have moderate needs. The idea behind shared hosting is quite simple – a lot of accounts on one single physical server. It is basically a dedicated server with installed OS and set of software. All of the accounts share resources and are restricted to use them for limited amounts of time. If an account violates the restrictions, it gets frozen or suspended for abuse. Policy violators cause overall slowdown for other users on the server because they use everybody else’s resources. While a dedicated server costs a lot of money, a shared account is very cheap (around $5-10 per month versus $200-700 for a dedicated server).

Installed and configured sets of software are available to everyone on a shared server, and only a small amount of adjustments can be done to this software due to the fact that it is used by all accounts. In most cases specific software sets cannot be installed at all. Administration privileges are limited to a simple user. Therefore, all important configurations are done by system administrators.

Reseller shared hosting plans have more functionality though and allow creating other hosting accounts. This way an owner of a reseller plan becomes a user with advanced privileges as compared to regular resold account users on the server. He can create, modify and delete hosting accounts according to the limits of the plans. In everything else he is pretty mush no different form a regular user.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Server is a special kind of hosting account located on a real carrier dedicated server. These virtual containers are created with the help of virtualization platforms. Latest advances in virtualization technologies provide VPSs with performance levels almost identical to the ones of its carriers. That means that now it is possible to have a lighter “virtual” dedicated server at prices, which are far cheaper than a physical one would actually be. As a matter of fact, a single real machine can now be in a way separated into several parts while every part will still posses features of the original system. The main distinction of a VPS is that it is fully isolated from other similar units on the same carrier dedicated server. Root access is no longer a restriction on VPS. This opens up full customization and administration capabilities. Many software sets and bundles can be installed and configured to your preference on a VPS.

As you can see, resource limitations that exist on shared accounts are no longer of any importance for VPS owner. He himself creates limitations and policies and decides the way all resources are used. However, it is important to remember that amount of available resources is limited. As the entire VPS runs on a set of several software products, including an OS, it is crucial not to deplete the resources. It is also important to keep in mind that a VPS is normally not as powerful as a server which hosts shared plans. That means that part of the VPS resources is spent on a general system functioning upkeep. Therefore, resource depletion will cause downtime of an entire VPS. Such downtime will include a need to reboot the container the hard way (i.e. by power reset). However, unlike a real server, when a VPS is incorrectly rebooted during hanging, there is no need for file system check or RAID rebuild, because these things are controlled on the side of the carrier server.

Bottom line

Hopefully, the information given above will help beginners better understand the differences between a VPS and Reseller hosting. VPSs are more powerful, provide more freedom, require more administration and cost a lot more than reseller accounts. On the other hand, reseller plans are relatively cheap, are fully managed by hosting company and are at the same time limited in features. Resource problems caused by a single account immediately may lead to service problems for an entire VPS. On the contrary, resold account taking up too much resources will lead to suspension of itself only, keeping all other accounts created by reseller online. Of course, there are more peculiarities in differences between the two, but it is quite obvious that a VPS is a choice for an experienced user with some skills of administration. Reseller hosting, on the other hand, is the best option for beginners. At the end of the day you can start with a reseller and then upgrade to a VPS if you feel need to.

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