recommendations for Reseller hosting with modx

I’m wanting to change my biz model to focus more on website design VS IT support. I’ve gotten about 6 sites up with modx evo this year. Most on the clients current host providers. I figure I can get some residual income by reselling hosting and domain names and so on. Though I’ve never done much server side outside of cpanel, and limited Linux experience. So wanting something that will be easy and straight forward in getting sites and emails set up for my clients, and having things segregated between clients, if they happen to want to manage things more themselves. So far client sites have been only a handful of pages, and some e-commerce sites with foxycart. My highest traffic site gets about 300 unique visitors a day, the others 5-20 a day, for an idea on server load.

I thought media temple would be a good place, but after looking at review and comments, it looks like it would be more hassle than it’s worth, I have yet to use and learn Plesk . A lot of reports of down times as well. issues when moving from the (gs) to higher offerings for when i start needing more server load.

I hear Site5 is decent for shared hosting, how is it for reselling?. I’ve had luck dealing with a local company, Canvasdreams.com so far. They have offerings similar to site5.


Anyone have any recommendations as to what host to go with to start reselling ? Success and horror stories?

-My main requirements are that they latency for the page loads are low,and handle the clients image request loads.
-That the modx manager is responsive, and loads it’s items in a timely manner.
-Has good uptime. Nothing i hate more than clients calling me on my Saturday saying their site isn’t working.... (scheduled maintenance normal)

I figure i’d switch over to revo as it seem like it would support multiple sites on onr install?, Any good knowledge chunks i should know to help ease the learning curve for revo?

Any peals of wisdom I can gleam from those that have done the resale biz?


Thanks for any tips, and help.

Where are the majority of your clients based? I’d recommend getting a virtual server to begin with - these you can start off small (and thus, cheap) and scale up as needed.

You probably already know this, but look for a provider near to where the majority of your clients (or your clients’ target audience) are based. Or, if funds allow, get servers in a couple of locations (e.g. UK and US) and offer them the option of where they want their sites hosted.

I can wholly recommend Memset or ValueVPS in the UK. They both offer virtual servers with control panels such as Plesk or CPanel. I used to have a virtual server hosted with Memset but I’ve recently moved to a dedicated server with ValueVPS earlier this year. In terms of downtime, I’ve had downtime for one reboot in a year with Memset (which was a Linux kernel security update, not their issue) and a couple of minutes with ValueVPS about a month ago when they upgraded one of their core routers.

As for easing the Revo curve - look into Contexts. These give you the multi-site/multi-domain/multi-subdomain capabilities.

Most of my clients will be locally based to me (Portland Oregon), I currently have no need for any UK servers.

Is there much of a difference between something like site5’s host reseller account and the VPS setup?

Thanks for the info on contexts. Looks like what I will need.

I would recommend Site5, it’s a great starting point and they have some nice resources for resellers. A resellers book, enom or opensrs account (for registering domains), and three billing system options (two free).

The uptime very good, heck look at my server: http://www.site5.com/support/uptime/zemni/ That outage was caused by the datacenter (The Planet). I’ve got around 40 MODx sites with Site5, so they are a quality host.

They offer Shared, VPS, Cloud, and Dedicated server options and are listed on the MODx site for hosting.

It’s a solid option if you want somewhere to start. If you need any help they have a great community forum with loads of helpful people.

AMDbuilder

Quote from: AMDbuilder at Nov 03, 2010, 09:47 PM

The uptime very good, heck look at my server: http://www.site5.com/support/uptime/zemni/ That outage was caused by the datacenter (The Planet). I’ve got around 40 MODx sites with Site5, so they are a quality host.

AMDbuilder

Have your sites been independently set up with modx evo or revo? or set up on revo under "one master" revo install? I still need to go through the revo Wiki and learn more on all the new stuff it does, and how to do it. Also get revo running on a host. Next weeks job

I have Evolution and Revolution installs in addition to some shared core Revolution sites. The sites are all isolated in their own cPanel accounts and with exception of shared core revolution sites nothing is shared between them. The shared core is just a copy of the core folder above public_html with permissions changed to allow for access by other sites. I am likely going to shift those sites back to their own installs as upgrading the core folder has me semi concerned.

If you are unsure about running things solo shoot me an email and I can likely help you get going.

Iv’e installed revo once no issues, so i think i got that covered. I ended up reverting that client back to evo, as the learning curve was taking me to long, and didn’t have the time to mess with things at that point.

I’m just interested in how revo’s shared core works and if it’s worth it to use a shared core between different clients.