A recommendation for White Label Webhosting?

>I've been looking for a company that offers white label webhosting
>that we can sell to our clients who don't want to deal with a hosting
>company.
>
>There is a ton of them out there, but I've been burned by just
>purchasing off of a website.

Phil,

 From long time personal experience I can recommend http://viaVerio.com/

Not always the cheapest, but that's not what you should be looking
for anyway. Their support is excellent (especially phone support
24/7/365)), and they have a number of email lists run by resellers,
broken down by product line, where you can ask for specific help or
general questions and often get extremely helpful answers right away
from other resellers that have been with them for years and know the
products and hosting environment inside and out. Lots of options as
well depending upon what hosting product lines you want to develop or
resell, and add on products too.

hth,
Brian White

>I've been looking for a company that offers white label webhosting
>that we can sell to our clients who don't want to deal with a hosting
>company.

Well first you need to decide exactly what you want/need.

How do you want the billing/support/managemnet to work?
* Who does the billing and collecting?
* Who does your client call for support? You? The host?
* Who does the OS management of the machine?
(I'm assuming you want to handle the user/site management.)

What role does the host play?
Are they just the facility/network/remote-hands?

Do you want a dedicated server (or even a pair of them: web/database)
or will having your sites on one or more of their servers do?

Do you want some sort of "control panel" UI?
Do you need access to the shell?
Only need FTP?

What UI do your clients expect, or will you do all that?

Need DNS & mail too?

What technology do you want? LAMP? .NET?/MSSQL? WebObjects & Openbase?

Anyway, once you have those questions answered your shopping list
will be shorter and easier to match with a potential host.


BTW: If you want higher levels of control/access, perhaps colocation
is a better option. Of course the colo market is further subdivided
into managed and unmanaged, supported, unsupported (Lights Out).


Just some industry FYI here....

Hosting is an industry that is really only about a decade old. It
went from being "boutique business" with high margins and few
customers to becoming a ubiquitous commodity with BRUTAL price
competition.

 From 95/98 until 2001 things were very good. Costs were high, but
people were willing to pay premiums. Growth was achievable just by
showing up to work every day and processing orders. Nobody ever
closed an account. In 1999/2000 the larger business world discovered
hosting as a business model and capacity boomed. Everybody started
selling hosting, from the phone companies & ISPs, to the computer
manufacturers (remember Dell, HP, Intel & Micron buying up or
starting hosting companies?)

2001 changed everything. Hosting companies were a good economic
indicator of the technology bust; they died off at a rate unseen
since the Cretaceous-Tertiary event. Those that had a critical mass
of good customers (in other words, real companies with real revenue,
not .com startups without a clue, much less any customers) survived,
but it was tough, as prices plummeted. Some companies even gave away
hosting for free for many years (Apple included.)

2003-2005 saw a lot of consolidation in the industry. The larger
companies reduced their number of facilities. Many mergers and
acquisitions happened (the only way to grow was to "buy customers.")
The technologies evolved to the point of reasonable standardization
on LAMP (Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP) with various UI/control panel
options evolving. This period also saw companies focus on strengths.
Pure hosting companies no longer chose to operate a facility, instead
opting to avoid the capital expense and just buy rackspace in
colocation facilities. Colocation companies began to shed
support/labor/development-intensive hosting operations and focus on
facilities.

2005-Present has seen the stabilization of the Internet economy.
Prices (and revenues) are no longer in free-fall and in fact I
imagine we'll see prices actually rise in the near future. Shared
hosting is still a bit flat, and the competition is tough, but the
colocation sector is doing very well and growing. Businesses tend to
want to run their own servers (colo) while individuals are what is
driving the hosting side of the business. Unfortunately for the
hosting companies, individuals are very price-sensitive, and their
loyalties are impossible to maintain, especially as the web landscape
is being fractured into all these little micro-markets where people
have their content littered all over: blogs (typepad, flikr, blogger,
livejournal, etc), Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, twitter, .mac, Yahoo
Groups, etc, etc, etc. The "control panel" web site managemnet UI's
are getting a little long in the tooth as well and are mostly being
replaced by LAMP-based content management systems like MoveableType
and WordPress.

The past two years have also seen some large-scale facility-related
outages (Seattle's Fisher Plaza/InterNap, Los Angeles' Garland
Building, and 365 Main in San Francisco to name a few) which have
downed some very high-profile shared hosting comapanies and popular
web services such as LiveJournal, DreamHost, TypePad, etc. The market
is demanding 100% uptime, which is only achievable with site
diversity and redundancy. Redundancy is VERY expensive. To duplicate
something costs more than 2X, more like >4X and to layer site
diversity on top of redundancy sends the costs into exponential
acceleration. Having redundant power, network, cooling, servers, and
related systems, geographically dispersed is not sustainable even for
thousands of dollars per month, much less the tens of dollars per
month which the market has established as the mean for website
hosting.


We live in interesting times.


Sorry to answer your questions with questions and a history lesson
Phil, but my goal is to arm you with "insider" data from which to do
your research.


--chuck goolsbee
digital.forest Inc.
Seattle, WA

On Oct 4, 2007, at 07:49, Phil Emery wrote:

> I've been looking for a company that offers white label webhosting
> that we can sell to our clients who don't want to deal with a hosting
> company.
>
> Anyone have any experiences with anyone they'd recommend?

Dixiesys

http://www.dixiesys.com

Thanks for all the info guys

I'll let you know what we finally decide.

thanks
- - - - - - - - - - -
Phil Emery