Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > How can growing resellers avoid the trap of "vendor lock-in"?
How can growing resellers avoid the trap of "vendor lock-in"?
| Posted by itdept, 07-30-2013, 11:42 PM |
| Many resellers plan to become entirely independent down the road, but find making the transition more difficult than it need be because of entanglements with their reseller account hosting provider. My immediate question, succinctly, is this: In what ways can a reseller in general, and a HostGator Reseller specifically, avoid the trap of "vendor lock-in"?
I'm thinking of such examples as HostGator's offering of BaseKit Site Builder. How does one deactivate this software and other sub-licensed and/or proprietary software from client access in cPanel? What other similar "blind spots" might a beginning reseller have that this fine community could shine a light on?
|
| Posted by RiversHosting, 07-31-2013, 04:13 AM |
| If you're concerned that, for example, BaseKit sitebuilder is a piece of software that you'll only be able to get with HostGator, your options are to: stay with HostGator, offering BaseKit, or to never allow your clients access to BaseKit. To keep your clients from using BaseKit, you can go into WHM and select the feature manager. Just uncheck the box for Basekit and it won't show in cPanel.
If these blind spots are features that your reseller account has and you're not sure if you can have the same features when you scale to a VPS or dedicated box, then you need to find out how you can license this. It might be as simple as $1 per month for Softaculous, or it could be a more complicated deal. It's really hard to tell without knowing what software you're running and would need to continue with in the future.
|
| Posted by Server Management, 07-31-2013, 07:14 PM |
| Having a decent "feature list" will likely solve this issue although correctly pricing your offerings will help with the move from shared/reseller to vps to dedicated server bare in mind a cPanel license will set you back the best part of $30/Month its all fine and dandy offering cheap accounts on cheap hardware but if you want to offer something of quality and long lasting you really need to charge a decent price and focus on the ones who want quality not cheap on some old pre-year 2000 processor.
|
| Posted by kpmedia, 07-31-2013, 08:51 PM |
| Just tell customers what is or isn't supported. You're just a host.
Third-party apps may be discontinued at any time.
|
| Posted by DWS2006, 08-01-2013, 09:15 AM |
| The best way to avoid locking yourself into a reseller account is to price your offerings accordingly from the start. Base your pricing on the revenue needed to cover hardware, software, and support (even if the reseller account is your only expense at the start).
|
| Posted by WebNet Host, 08-01-2013, 06:08 PM |
| I think this is always the case when hosting, if you grow with a host you are sort of locked in, but a way you can avoid this is to use WHM/cPanel, that way its easy to always move around.
|
| Posted by Mad_matt, 08-01-2013, 06:59 PM |
| I see no harm in the concept of growing, and simply attaching another server and keeping both the reseller and the other server running side by side.
Whmcs can easily adapt to adding more servers.
The new signups will never have access to "basekit" and will be happy. The current members, will retain access to anything they use, and will also be happy, but yes, they are kinda locked into that server, but when users need to upgrade, you can migrate them to the new server, and deal with it case by case. I doubt many even use basekit...
Additionally, as the company grows, with your billing system on one server, and the majority of your clients on a different server is a better setup and allows for you to keep in touch with clients (handle refunds or give clients backups if need be, or making announcements.) -> whatever your setup, you dont want your only point of contact during downtime to be via the paypal dispute resolution center
One thing that I was keen to avoid is that if there is downtime, and clients see the main site down, whats their first thoughts? whereas if their sites are down, and the main site is still working (or vica versa), its alot better situation.
|
| Posted by DWS2006, 08-01-2013, 08:07 PM |
| Completely agree, while a little off-topic, this is a valid concern and something that I think a lot of upstarts don't think about.
|
Add to Favourites 
Print this Article
Also Read
