The future of reseller hosting – Cloud Reseller Hosting!
February 17 , 2011
Reseller hosting has been wildly popular among web developers, digital agencies and other multi-website-managing professionals for years. Reseller control panels such as cPanel, Plesk and H-Sphere have been around for a long time. They are excellent for managing multiple customer websites, establishing hosting plans, and in a general sense allow companies that don’t have the necessary resources to create own web hosting operation in a very economical way.
Traditional reseller hosting, however, has serious drawbacks. Being based on single machines, it has all the problems that traditional web hosting has, and then some.
First, a single machine doesn’t scale. You may be able to upgrade hardware, but that requires downtime and it is limited by the supported hardware. For companies to be able to offer low prices on reseller packages, they have to oversell their capacity. The combination of these two factors spells disaster: As resellers add more and more of their customers’ websites to the machine, it’s load increases until it reaches a point where performance becomes an issue. When that time comes, resellers will have to either migrate their customers to another server (with all the pain that that change implies – hard coded IPs in customer programming, anyone?), or weather the storm until enough other tenants move out.
Second, shared infrastructure has an inherent problem when one of the tenants suffers the “digg effect”. Suppose a single website belonging to one reseller’s customer gets listed on a very popular site like digg, or maybe starts a TV campaign. That website will have a traffic spike that will affect access not only to itself, but to its “neighbors” both within the same reseller account and within the same physical machine (which belong to other resellers completely).
Last, but no less important, is the fact that bad things happen. Machines fail, networks fail, people fail. In a traditional hosting setup, customers with more than one website usually have their sites scattered among several machines, and there’s a one-to-one relationship between hardware failure and website downtime. In reseller situtations, however, things are quite different. A hardware failure may take tens, even hundreds of customer websites offline, creating a serious problem for the reseller.
What alternatives are there, one might ask? Well, the same Cloud buzz that’s been all over lately applies to Reseller Hosting as well. Cloud Reseller Hosting is basically a reseller control panel software package installed on a Cloud Server. This setup overcomes the shortcomings of traditional reseller hosting by leveraging the strengths of Cloud Computing.
By having near-endless, on-demand scalability, Cloud Reseller Hosting eliminates the growth problem for its users. Since the Cloud can be upgraded by adding more equipment without interruptions, the reseller provider can avoid bottlenecks by simply planning server capacity to cover growing demand. This translates to a borderless growth for resellers.
Peaks in usage are also no longer a problem, since the cloud naturally has excess capacity available to absorb greater loads. The same reasoning that allows for endless expansion means that resources are always available for bursts in machine usage. This makes cloud reseller hosting much more robust than the common shared reseller setup.
Finally, Clouds offer much better (effective) SLAs than single-server configurations. The fact that a machine can fail and another take its place in a transparent, imperceptible manner makes Cloud Reseller Hosting much less risky for resellers. Lots of reseller hosting providers promise SLAs of even 100%, but basically all that means is that, in case of any downtime, they’ll reimburse the amount paid for that period, sometimes multiplied by some compensating factor. That doesn’t keep the reseller’s customers from being harmed by their websites being offline and contacting the reseller to give him or her a piece of their mind…
So in summary, I believe that Cloud Reseller Hosting is a new, exciting way for digital agencies and web developers to create their own web hosting plans and make money without all the problems associated with single-server reseller hosting. It is now not a question of if, but when, Cloud Reseller Hosting will become mainstream.
Tags: Cloud Computing, cloud reseller, cloud reseller hosting, reseller hosting
4 de April de 2011 12:29 am
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