H-sphere resellers

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > H-sphere resellers

Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 06:37 AM
Just out of curiousity, why do so many hosts offering H-sphere reseller hosting not allow you to setup free hosting accounts?
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-27-2006, 06:59 AM
If you're talking about why we don't offer unlimited end-user accounts, that's because H-Sphere is licensed on a per-account basis. We have to pay a license fee to support every user on our system. This model differs from other control panels, such as CPanel, that charge a license fee for each server that uses the software. As a side effect, this increases the startup prices for anyone wishing to setup H-Sphere, and weeds out a lot of the fly-by-night movement. That is why you will not see a fly-by-night H-Sphere host. It's simply too expensive to give up. CPanel, on the other hand, has spawned infinite reseller loops and the like on eBay...
Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 07:37 AM
Actually I was not referring to that. I have actually seen a number of reseller accounts offering for example 50 user accounts but, and this is a direct quote: "Actual account (Control Panel billable accounts, free hosting accounts are not allowed)" I just find it all a bit confusing.
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-27-2006, 07:41 AM
In that case, that's probably just the host's precaution from giving access to random people to compromise the system's integrity. It's not that we don't want you to run a Geocities-like community (if you can afford it and choose to do so), it's just that we take a lot of extra risks if there is no verifiable billing information exchanged. Anyone can sign up for access for the account, and therefore, even spammers and other malicious webscum can take advantage of stuff like that.
Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 07:44 AM
Would the risk not be with the reseller though?
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-27-2006, 07:51 AM
The reseller definitely does take a risk, but on our end, if one of our servers gets blacklisted on the spam database for whatever reason, then all of our clients will end up suffering, so the risk is that much greater for us. Besides, are people really that desperate to give away free hosting? I think for the most part, hosts don't mind or care if you give it away to family and friends. It becomes an issue when you give away hosting for free to the anonymous public. That's where all the bad apples are.
Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 07:53 AM
Ah yes, one does tend to forget that aspect of host reselling. Cheers.
Posted by IHSL, 03-27-2006, 10:55 AM
I am not sure where you get the ebay-cpanel link, or even the 'fly by night' link. Sure, H-Sphere (when done correctly) take more expertise because of it's tiering structure, but cPanel prices just as much, if not more, to deploy. In answer to the topic starters question: This issue is not control panel specific. Many reseller hosting providers simply do not want free hosting services on their servers. This is because, as HybridReseller said, the vast majority of free hosting services collect minimal data from the customer, and have no monetary link with their customers which causes great concern for illegal software, email, etc. Services that require payment and a paper trail are easier to protect from such issues. Simon
Posted by hivelocitygm, 03-27-2006, 11:02 AM
From experience I can tell you that whenever a customer of ours has offered free hosting accounts it has usually led to a problem on one of the the servers in our Hsphere cluster. When you offer free hosting you attract a lot of bad apples who have no regard of your AUP. We have disallowed free hosting accounts for these reasons.
Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 01:26 PM
Is there anyway of lowering the risk arising from a free account ?
Posted by hivelocitygm, 03-27-2006, 01:32 PM
You could eliminate email and webmail features from the free accounts until after you have confirmed the contact information. It would be unlikely a spammer would give a valid phone # in the order.
Posted by ldcdc, 03-27-2006, 01:39 PM
Not allowing instant acccess and asking for a list of domains that will be hosted (so you can review them)? But of course, this would put you at a dissadvantage when compared to the completely automated instant setup free hosting.
Posted by cartika-andrew, 03-27-2006, 03:00 PM
I dont believe this to be h-sphere specific - A better question would be why do so many reseller providers do not allow free hosting services No, the reseller (if offering free hosting) - is actually putting their root provider and all other customers at risk. If mail server IP's get blacklisted for spamming, who suffers from this? Heck, the reseller can pack up and move to another provider, but, the root provider and the remaining customers are left to deal with the mess. If any malicious scripts are executed, etc... the risk is entirely with the root provider, not with the reseller customer...
Posted by mnrbig, 03-27-2006, 06:59 PM
It was just an observation based on my experience while searching for a web host.
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-27-2006, 11:43 PM
Regarding the ebay-cpanel link: http://search.ebay.com/search/search...rclo=&saprchi= Take a look at what control panel they're mostly using. Big surprise, ain't it? The reason I made the fly-by-night comment is because many datacenters allow users to lease CPanel for around $25 a month on top of their server prices. A lot of people start by competing on price, price themselves out of existence, can't pay their server bill, and their customers go down the drain along with it. You can't quite do that with H-Sphere because you have to buy licenses outright, and at least in blocks of 25.
Posted by IHSL, 03-28-2006, 07:31 AM
Not really. A product that sells so many units is highly likely, in this day and age, is bound to appear on eBay. I can't see how that ties in with your original post when you inferred that cPanel is for fly by night companies. You can also lease H-Sphere at a low cost. H-Sphere's licensing, that goes as low as $2 per license in bulk for outright purchase, is not expensive and tiers across an entire cluster of servers with no limits (even less immedately expensive when you lease the licenses). Once you get past a particular number of servers with cPanel the prices for deploying it become greater than H-Sphere. Nonsense. If a company is going to bury themselves under bad management, that has nothing to do with cPanel. It has to do with the fact that any company that is as badly run as you say simply does not belong in the business world. Don't compare bad business management with cPanel, there's simply no genuine link there, though you seem to be trying your best to make it so. I have run clusters of both control panel, and still do. I find that the expense is higher with cPanel (licensing prices only) but the required expertise is greater with H-Sphere because of it's tendancy to basically take over the OS, and the fact that 20 servers intertwined tend to cause more problems than a standalone. The advantages and disadvantages of H-Sphere and cPanel respectively are in abundance. Leave it at technical aspects though, not some hogwash about 'fly by night hosts' and ebay. Simon
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-28-2006, 07:53 AM
Simon, it is because CPanel offers unlimited user accounts that the product can flourish on eBay. Granted, I'm not making a blanket statement on CPanel hosts, but you have to agree that CPanel does it make it possible for some host with a bad business plan to overload a server with thousands of accounts. There is simply no limit to how many accounts one can create on CPanel since the software is not priced based on that factor. This is simply not possible, no matter how low the licensing cost is, on a H-Sphere system because accounts will always be the limiting factor. Of course, when deployed properly by knowledgeable techs coupled with a proper business plan to allocate enough resources for each user, the control panel rarely becomes the issue. But the point of the statement that I'm trying to make is that CPanel does allow for a sinister host to advertise "unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited accounts". If you were an unsuspecting customer on eBay, why wouldn't you fall for it? And apparently, there are now parent-reseller accounts, which allow you to create resellers. So, as you can see, that infinite reseller loop can easily happen with CPanel. I don't think you can just lambast me with "nonsense" and "hogwash" about those statements. I have come across the products for these infinite reseller loops myself and it is without a doubt in my mind that many have suffered under them since they don't realize how far deep into the reseller chain they really are. Try showing me a host that can offer unlimited accounts running h-sphere, then we'll start talking. Once again, I'm trying to make the point that there are definitely some bad apples out there who overextend a server's resources by offering ridiculous packages to too many customers and cram them all onto a small server. While it is just as easy for an H-Sphere host to offer big packages, it is not as easy for him to create infinite reseller loops and the like so that account creation gets entirely out of hand. You cannot possibly offer 0.99/yr hosting accounts on h-sphere, yet you can with cpanel. And you might even be able to get away with that by selling thousands until the server eventually gets disgustingly overloaded. And, with regards to business management, you are definitely right that if a person goes ahead with a bad biz plan, it wouldn't matter what control panel he chose. Except particular bad business plans are possible with one control panel and not another.
Posted by Yash-JH, 03-28-2006, 08:09 AM
Well, I'd agree with the point that the startup prices for HSphere are definately higher. Setting up a decent HSphere cluster does cost more money and hence tends to keep out alot of startups or resellers that want to start with minimal prices and expand as they grow... I don't know how HSphere is cheaper than cPanel.. As someone that spends $$$$ every month in HSphere licensing, cpanel at $30/mo per server definately seems much cheaper and attractive from the licensing point of view.. Also, HSphere hosts need speciality administrators to manage the many diverse systems an HSphere host uses.. But what justifies the higher prices with HSphere is definately the automation and the features it offers..
Posted by IHSL, 03-28-2006, 11:26 AM
If you only lease the license, then of course it works out cheaper in the short term. In your post you are comparing leasing to purchasing. That is a biased comparison. You could switch that situation around and compare leasing H-Sphere licenses from Comodo with purchasing cPanel licenses, which would also be an unfair comparison. I agree with the expertise level point, if deploying H-Sphere to it's fullest and managing it correctly. As I said in an earlier post, the expertise required are greater when dealing with a dual-OS system such as H-Sphere. The available workforce is growing for the H-Sphere market and that is great to see. H-Sphere's undoubted quality is not at question in my posts, however. In the same way that H-Sphere unfairly and incorrectly gets tagged by many as too difficult or complex and is often portrayed as only for the elite, cPanel shouldn't get the sore end of that deal by tying it directly with ebay and fly by nights. There's many sub-par providers offering H-Sphere, and many good providers. The same goes for cPanel. Simon
Posted by Yash-JH, 03-28-2006, 11:59 AM
If I were to purchase cPanel, it would be even cheaper for us. We are only adding a couple of servers each month.. I assume a cpanel paid license is around $300? yep, would be even cheaper than leasing. If I was adding even 10 servers a month, I'd still be paying alot less with cPanel than we currently do every month for HSphere. Not to say I am unhappy it prices more. I know that I am getting a quality product for the price. But its certainly not cheaper IMHO
Posted by cartika-andrew, 03-28-2006, 03:57 PM
Agreed, it shouldnt - however, most (not all certainly) web hosting startups use cpanel because of the lower entry point and fewer barriers to entering the industry (lower prices, multitude of low cost support options, unlimited user account capability, etc) Typically speaking, a greater number of hosts entering the industry that can be classified as "fly by night" or "ebay" hosts utilize the cpanel platform. However, I am not particular how significant this stat is because 1) more hosts use cpanel and 2) as you indicated there are good and bad hosts - and this really is platform independant. Well, here is the problem as I see it. If you have qualified people maintaining hsphere, the TCO is significantly less then cpanel. Therefore, trying to isolate this down to licensing prices may not be the correct way to handle this - as licensing prices really become irrelavent. However, a great number of people starting in this industry are not doing TCO studies over 6 or 12 months - the ones that do, irrespective of their CP decision, will more then likely not fit the "fly by night" or "ebay" host definition - the ones that do not take the time to perform such analysis are more likely to fit that definition - and although people that do take the time to create a business plan, etc may choose 1 of several directions, those that do not will almost always choose cpanel - as - if you are not prone to making a proper business analysis and projecting prices, then you almost certainly will choose the cheapest route to startup - and in this case, its certainly cheapest to start up with cpanel... Disagree - we looked at doing it this way several times. End of the day, it is server resources that are the limiting factor, not number of accounts. We decided against this not because of the licensing issues, but because of the same reason we think its a bad idea to offer this on cpanel. Server resources are the limiting factor - I keep going back to Simons comments - there are good and bad companies, and it doesnt have much to do with the control panel they use..
Posted by HybridReseller, 03-28-2006, 07:24 PM
Hi Cartika, I just wanted to clarify my point about how H-Sphere's accounts would be the limiting factor. The given situation would be a fly-by-night H-Sphere host who didn't care enough to get a good business plan and wanted to market his services on eBay based on volume and price rather than based on quality and value. In that case, if he wanted to cram as many users onto a server, the economic limitation would not be the server itself but the license fees he would have to pay to support enough users. Obviously, as you and I well know, there is no incentive to cram users onto a single server when running on H-Sphere since we don't pay more license fees for using more servers. And in terms of leasing H-Sphere, you simply cannot make a valid comparison between leasing options because PSoft does not offer an unlimited-account lease based on the number of servers used, unlike CPanel. The whole situation I've discussed thus far is about the eBay host who wishes to sell as many cheap accounts as possible, without regard for planned server capacity or a sustaining business plan. CPanel by and large makes this option a whole lot more possible. I am not implying that all hosts who use CPanel are bad. I definitely know some very well-managed hosts who run the platform. But the flexibility it offers by granting unlimited accounts is easily abused without the end-user realizing what they're in for. Secondly, nobody chooses H-Sphere as a first choice unless they've thoroughly researched all the control panels. And by association, if they've put that much effort into research, most likely they do want their business to stick around for the long run. Are there bad H-Sphere hosts out there? Definitely. But will a large-scale H-Sphere host with thousands of accounts disappear like your fly-by-night? Probably not. The fact is, a H-Sphere host with 2,000 accounts has invested a whole lot more money than a CPanel host with 2,000 accounts, and I don't care if you do the comparison based on leasing vs licensing, cheese vs butter, etc. Anyway you cut it, H-Sphere will still end up costing more based on the assumption that the host is trying to cram as many accounts on a single server as possible, which is what a lot of these fly-by-night ebay hosts do.

Add to Favourites Print this Article