----- Original Message ----- From: "Timothy Tate" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 7:43 AM
Subject: Will TuCows ever offer reseller webhosting?
The premade instant website packages through "website builder" certainly serves a niche, but I'm wondering why TuCows just doesn't offer reseller webhosting along with all the other services. It certainly seems like a logical product addition to me.
I had a sales demo of the Blogware product yesterday and it is hosted on Tucows servers.
I can certainly say it is very difficult to find quality reseller webhosting relationships. They all seem to come to an end eventually and resellers are always on the short end of the stick when the provider decides to move, sell the business off or shut down.
I know how you feel.
Before we had our own servers we were resellers for two companies.
The one who we got windows hosting from decided to sell up and we were left stranded.
I also had problems with a resold DNS service (not Tucows).
This puts me off using any service hosted on another providers servers where we don't have control.
However, I think Tucows would work because I know they would throw money at it to make it work rather than have it collapse in embarassment.
I am looking at the blogware product this weekend with a view to offering it shortly.
I'm just wondering what is keeping TuCows out of this market.
It would mean they were competing directly with their resellers, most of whom are web hosting companies or ISP's.
Developing stable control panel with enough features to satisfy end users is a huge task.
Buying into something like Plesk or Cpanel is possible but may not be scaleable.
This is one of the most difficult parts of web hosting.
We use Cpanel but with many of the "advanced" (read that as "troublesome") features turned off and a centralised DNS system. As its supplied out of the box it is not scaleable to large service providers.
It also does not support clustering well enough.
This is where most control panels fall down - scaleability.
the modifications we have done (within the licence) make it work for us.
We serve about 24,000 sites off cpanel servers now.
Another issue is abuse.
Tucows would need alarge abuse department to deal with spammers and other issues.
This would be another overhead to be factored in.
Plus, the price of reseller hosting has dropped through the floor.
We had someone leave us to go to 5GB with unlimited domains for $5 a month.
(Yes, I know its probably a poor service, but marketing wise people do look for low price points, we handle that by habing a low entry price point but only for hosting of 5 domains so we limit what we are willing to provide at that price).
There would be very slim profits for Tucows in that type of market.
I must remember not to drink so much coffee on a Saturday morning!
Regards
Gordon Hudson Hostroute.com Ltd www.hostroute.net
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