I have and use reseller accounts on my VPS (provided through powervps.com) to set up multiple domains and wikis. Maintaining a wiki farm in such an environment is fairly easy to do, and the individual accounts are able to manage their own mail settings, mailing lists, and other items through the cpanel interface. It works very well.
That said, I've never actually done any invoicing or bookkeeping for these accounts, as I host them as a donation/courtesy to various organizations I'm involved with or feel like supporting. In 2006 I also wrote a longish message on this subject on another list [1], and what I wrote there continues to be true today -- it's important to find a service provider where their "typical client" fits your profile, because their support systems are then tuned to meeting your needs most effectively. For many years I would be at providers where the issues I had were not the common ones for the provider, and I had many frustrations and delays as a result. [1] http://www.ntlug.org/pipermail/discuss/Week-of-Mon-20060828/026653.html To answer some of the specifics of your message: > Do reseller accounts typically include Virtual Private Server service, > or not? If not, that is something I should also look for, right? VPS and reseller accounts can be either separate or combined -- i.e., one can have a VPS-only, reseller only, or VPS+reseller. I have the latter. I decided to go with VPS because I wanted better ability to troubleshoot and tune things myself without having to go through support (and would probably choose this even if I didn't already know how to do that because I can always learn). > In > either case, I would need the host to provide support for hardware and > LAMP system stuff, as I would have no clue how to administer my own > environment. How do I ask for this - what's the correct terminology? This is normally provided for you as part of any VPS or reseller package -- the provider takes care of the basic operating system and software updates, you're responsible only for any customizations you perform. > AND I'd ideally like to be able to manage the client sites as fields > in a wiki farm, so somehow I'd like to be able to have the PmWiki > engine installed on a parent account that the client fields would take > orders from. Is this possible, in a reseller environment? It's certainly possible, but in this case you probably want to be sure to get a virtual private server. With a reseller-only account you might not have sufficient access to be able to easily make the wikifarm installation available to your clients -- having a VPS means you almost certainly can do it. Another reason to favor having a VPS is that with reseller-only accounts there may be other resellers' clients sharing the server (virtual or otherwise) with your clients. This can make things a bit more complicated if you ever want to upgrade your service level with a provider, or migrate to another provider. Also, having your own VPS means you don't have to worry about other resellers' clients being able to (accidentally or maliciously) access your clients' data. If you decide to go with a VPS+reseller combination similar to what I have with pmwiki.org, I highly recommend PowerVPS.com . I've had very good experience with them, both in terms of long-term stability and in the responsiveness/quality of their support teams. Unlike many providers, they _only_ offer VPS and dedicated hosting packages, and not individual site accounts. The advantage of this (and the primary advantage I was looking for) is that my support questions aren't buried in a flood of "How do I change my password?" and "What is a domain?" types of questions that come from the people buying smaller packages available from other providers. The potential disadvantage is that I don't know how much "hand-holding" they're able to provide for those types of questions if you're likely to have them. However, it appears to me that the web interfaces they provide are such that even someone with limited LAMP experience would be able to function well in their vps. Hope this helps; if I can provide any more details or answer other questions I'll be glad to do so. Pm _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
