Reseller hosting question

anotherpoolie

Thanks again guys for your replies. However, with regards to 'keyser666' comments on finding it 'remarkable and 'having it good for too long' - you are way off the mark. There are thousands of small designers/companies like myself who can not afford to pay for the infrastructure required to host multiple Websites and as such we rent space of larger companies who provide this services – That is what reseller hosting is.

Granted on some accounts we can make a good margin, however I have many accounts that are domain only - for these I charge £6.00 per year and the domain comes in to me at approx £4 – leaving a profit of just £2.00 – and that is without including any advertising costs, so you can see the problem when a supplier suddenly increases their costs by 10x per month.

Here is the supplier and product in question (sorry – I’ve had to break the link as it wont let me post)

heartinternet dot co dot uk /reseller-hosting/

I have now located several other small businesses in an identical position to myself. I just can’t believe that they can continue to advertise the service in the way they do and then up the costs once your tied in!

gb12345

anotherpoolie wrote: »

Granted on some accounts we can make a good margin, however I have many accounts that are domain only - for these I charge £6.00 per year and the domain comes in to me at approx £4 – leaving a profit of just £2.00 – and that is without including any advertising costs, so you can see the problem when a supplier suddenly increases their costs by 10x per month.

Surely from this, you can see their point of view. You have some accounts that are barely making you a profit - what would you do if you found out that each of these domain only deals were actually costing you £10 per year to obtain (when you factor in advertising and admin costs etc). I am sure that unless there was a good business reason for keeping them (i.e. the same owner also had other profitable accounts with you, so you made a profit from them overall), you would ditch them.

Unfortuanately, your supplier has done a cost/benefit analysis on the income that you provide to them and has identified that you are not profitable, so they have taken action to rectify that. I am sure that their T&C will be worded to enable them to do this.

You are raising a ticket every couple of days - what do they all relate to? It would either indicate that there are major problems with the service provided to you by Heart or that you are not technically capable of providing a web hosting service.

lucy03

anotherpoolie wrote: »

Thanks again guys for your replies. However, with regards to 'keyser666' comments on finding it 'remarkable and 'having it good for too long' - you are way off the mark. There are thousands of small designers/companies like myself who can not afford to pay for the infrastructure required to host multiple Websites and as such we rent space of larger companies who provide this services – That is what reseller hosting is.

Granted on some accounts we can make a good margin, however I have many accounts that are domain only - for these I charge £6.00 per year and the domain comes in to me at approx £4 – leaving a profit of just £2.00 – and that is without including any advertising costs, so you can see the problem when a supplier suddenly increases their costs by 10x per month.

Here is the supplier and product in question (sorry – I’ve had to break the link as it wont let me post)

heartinternet dot co dot uk /reseller-hosting/

I have now located several other small businesses in an identical position to myself. I just can’t believe that they can continue to advertise the service in the way they do and then up the costs once your tied in!

I note this is a Host Europe company, so they're pretty big. I've had a look at their terms and conditions, and they seem from my opinion to be water-tight to allow them to make price increases and service as long as they give 30 days notice.

Companies don't usually like getting rid of clients, but if they're not cost effective then there's not much that can be done. All I could suggest is writing to them with a proposal of how much the reseller account would be used for and ask them if they're willing to service that for an agreed fee which they'll agree to for a contractual period.

artbaron

The "unlimited" options suggest this company isn't much good. Nothing is unlimited without qualification, it's impossible, as you've just found out. The company have been very unprofessional - their email sounds like something a petulant school kid might write - but on the other hand you have a crazy number of accounts on one hosting plan. And are those on a shared plan? If so, that's insane, honestly. Why not just get a dedicated server and do the maintenance work yourself?

anotherpoolie

artbaron wrote: »

The "unlimited" options suggest this company isn't much good. Nothing is unlimited without qualification, it's impossible, as you've just found out. The company have been very unprofessional - their email sounds like something a petulant school kid might write - but on the other hand you have a crazy number of accounts on one hosting plan. And are those on a shared plan? If so, that's insane, honestly. Why not just get a dedicated server and do the maintenance work yourself?

Thanks again for feedback guys - some of it very useful. With regards to quotes above - I completely agree, the way the emails have been worded are unbelievably - they actually get a lot worse as I try to argue my point!

As for the number of domains on the hosting, this is not unusual in my line of business, I actually run the business using seven reseller accounts from five different providers (4 of them UK based) and also a dedicated server. Domains are placed within different plans depending on some of the specifications ordered, however the largest account has been running with a UK provider for over ten years (at a cost of about £50 per month), this single account currently holds around 4000 domains but at its largest held 8000 without issue (and without price increases!!).

My main gripe in all of this is 'not been told beforehand' - if they had said, 'if you add this many accounts' or 'if you open this many support tickets' the price will increase - I would of known and had a choice - the reason it annoys me so much is because they have told me retrospectively.

CoolHotCold

Unfortunately, as others have said either like it or lump it.

Their T&C seem pretty clear they can hike prices whenever they like. Case closed, either pay the difference or move to another hosting package or try and come to agreement with your current provider.

Sorry, but it wasn't a consumer question in the first place, and the T&C are not unfair, so little room for you to argue.

Their communications and they way they word them have no legal baring.

keyser666

anotherpoolie wrote: »

Thanks again guys for your replies. However, with regards to 'keyser666' comments on finding it 'remarkable and 'having it good for too long' - you are way off the mark. There are thousands of small designers/companies like myself who can not afford to pay for the infrastructure required to host multiple Websites and as such we rent space of larger companies who provide this services – That is what reseller hosting is.

Granted on some accounts we can make a good margin, however I have many accounts that are domain only - for these I charge £6.00 per year and the domain comes in to me at approx £4 – leaving a profit of just £2.00 – and that is without including any advertising costs, so you can see the problem when a supplier suddenly increases their costs by 10x per month.

Here is the supplier and product in question (sorry – I’ve had to break the link as it wont let me post)

heartinternet dot co dot uk /reseller-hosting/

I have now located several other small businesses in an identical position to myself. I just can’t believe that they can continue to advertise the service in the way they do and then up the costs once your tied in!

I am aware of what reseller hosting is, as someone who has been MCSE, since NT4>2008. CNE, CCEE, VCP and Prince 2 and ITIL qualified and someone that runs several VPS I would say I am qualified to know what reseller hosting is and costs associated with infrastructure costs. That would I would also say qualifies my statement above.

arcon5

You can rent a server for about a hundred quid... Do that. They won't up the price as such then, its just service speeds become slower as more and more websites require resources.

But if you can't afford the £300 ish quid with 1k customers you really need to revise your business model.

nox118

see bbc.co.uk/news/business-18017722
you could take them to court over unfair charges, but would need a good laywer

keyser666

arcon5 wrote: »

You can rent a server for about a hundred quid... Do that. They won't up the price as such then, its just service speeds become slower as more and more websites require resources.

But if you can't afford the £300 ish quid with 1k customers you really need to revise your business model.

Have to agree here. You could get a good VPS that will cost about £100 a year with £10.50 a month for a WHM\Cpanel Licence. You could make bundles off of that especially if you are established over 11 odd years and have a client base.