Becoming a reseller

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 10:34 am Post subject: Becoming a reseller

I've had a couple of emails from Nethosted regarding becoming a reseller, but I thought I would go public with some of the questions, as it may help others in a similar position to me.

We are a small IT company that looks after a number (15-20) of our customer's domains and Internet presence. I currently have a 1and1 account on Linux servers where all the hosting and email is handled.

Recently, 1and1 have experienced a severe outage on their email servers that lasted nearly a week and caused us no end of grief with our customers. Many of them rely on email to run their business, so any disruption to their email service causes their world to end.

They also have a major shortcoming with the technical ability of the helpdesk - just a desk, no help, and certainly no technical ability.

I have been looking for a suitable hosting company to move our accounts to. We used to have all our domains with PurplePaw, but moved away from them for the same reasons we are now looking to move away from 1and1 - poor email/technical/customer service. As everyone is probably aware, there are a myriad of options out there, but we have to feel comfortable that the service we will get (primarily email availability) will meet our 'unwritten' SLA's with our customers.

I have read all the testimonials on your site and compared your offerings with others. You certainly seem to fit the bill in terms of what you can offer us, but I have a few questions that I need reassuring answers to before we can commit all our customers to you. As a reseller, we have a great deal to lose if we make the wrong decision at this point, as we have a very good relationship with our customers, and I can't afford to jeopardize that.

1. What exposure do you have as a company if Andrew decides that he really does need a holiday, or goes sick.
2. Are you really more than a one-man band - I do understand that size can adversely impact a company's ability to respond to its customers. I think I read that you have around 3-4000 accounts, is this enough to keep your business model intact.
3. What provisions are there should one of your servers go down for any length of time. I'm mainly thinking about email here - a delay of several hours we can live with and our customers accept readily, but anything that stretches into the next day really does give us grief.
4. Would we be able to set up the accounts so that the primary MX record points to your servers, but the secondary MX record points to the IP address of the customer site, so that email can be delivered direct to site should your servers be down.
5. My finance director took a sharp intake of breath when I told him that you weren't VAT registered. Any ammunition you can give me to allay his fears ?

Sorry if some of these questions have been answered elsewhere, but having all the answers together makes it easier for me to justify moving to you to my MD.

Cheers for now.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

Hi,

1. There are procedures in place for this, Darryl would take over the main running of the business with the support of Josh.

2. As above

3. The server you would be put on would be configured with hardware RAID1. Therefore if there was a disk failure (the most common type of hardware failure) the server should be back up and running in less than an hour. Software problems are dealt with automatically in most cases, if not by a member of staff.

4. I can't see how that would work, as email is contained on the server you are put on it is accessilbe via the same IP as your site. Even if you were to get a dedicated IP that IP would still point to the same server.

5. We're not required to register for VAT at this time, however we will be doing so voluntarily in the coming months. The only delay is in a new billing system that can cope with tax. We're actually just awaiting the finalisation of one more module in that system before we can start to test it and then go live.

Thanks,

Andrew

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:26 pm Post subject:

Andrew,

Glad to see that your replies are still as quick - I have spent longer on hold with 1and1 waiting for the first automated response than it took you to reply !!

Thanks for the replies. Having read question 4 again, I probably didn't phrase it quite right. However, some technical understanding may be missing on my part as well

My understanding is that you can have primary and secondary MX records assigned to your domain. Normally, these both point to the host for the domain, which in your case would be Pluto, Neptune or whichever server is appropriate. My idea of setting the secondary MX record to something else is to try and mitigate any server downtime. If the secondary MX record for a domain was set to point to the IP address of the customer's ADSL connection, ie their public IP address (and not their web site, which would be on your server, which is how my original question does seem to read), then I could set up suitable port forwarding on the customer firewall to forward any incoming email to their mail server. Once your server was back up and running, the primary MX record would kick in again, and normal service would be resumed.

If you are telling me that this scenario is not possible, that's OK. I know that people do set their secondary MX pointer to an alternative address, and by using the public IP address of the customer, I could direct the stream of email traffic appropriately. However, if my understanding is a bit warped, then please tell me as learning is something I don't mid doing from time to time.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

Ah, it's now clear what you are looking to achieve! Yes this is possible. As a reseller you get full control each domains' DNS Zone so you can add additional MX records.

Thanks,

Andrew

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 12:56 pm Post subject:

Having never had to do this before, can you tell me whether this is a feasible mode of operating email - is practise as good as theory ?

How long does it take before the secondary MX will kick in ? Is it based on DNS timings, so some servers would recognise the change quicker than others ?

Does the email get sent to the secondary MX as SMTP mail (requiring me to set up port forwarding for port 25 on the customer firewall) ?

If this really is as easy to set up as it seems, then my fears of downed email become much reduced, as there is a secondary route for emails to take. Seeing as the reseller account lets us have enough control over this to set it up as we see fit, I think I am starting to get that warm fuzzy feeling back ....

Thanks Andrew - hope to have the go-ahead for the reseller account by the end of the week.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 1:01 pm Post subject:

I've been very happy with Nethosted over the last couple of years we have been hosted with them. I have no problems with recommending them to other people (and I have done so). However, the doesn't mean that I trust them

.

As you have found out in the past, companies both big and small can have problems which knock out your website / email for extended periods of time. The question is, what do you do when it all goes wrong. How do you get your domain / emails working again? My solution is to keep control of the domain myself and just point it at the webhosters name servers. This way, I know I can set up an account with another webhoster and redirect the domain to them. It can take a few hours / days for the new address to resolve but at least I know that this will get the site back online. It at least allows you to do something when there is a problem and you don't get any support/updates from your hoster.

Of course when there has been a problem at nethosted Andrew has been very good at explaining what has happened and what is being done to fix it.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

Having multiple MX records is feasible and good practice. MX records have priorities, so that's how you specify which order your MX records should be tried. You can therefore have this all setup before any theoretical downtime, so no need to worry about DNS timings.

Glad to hear you will be coming onboard!

Andrew

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 1:22 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the input - nice to have another customer's point of view on things.

It's a pity that you only get to see how good a company really is when the chips are down and something goes wrong. Whilst 1and1 do offer telephone support, it is next to useless, and often takes in excess of 30 minutes to reach somebody. Checking through the support forums here, at least Andrew does seem to keep on top of any problems, letting you know what is wrong, what he is doing to fix it, time frames, etc. In my position, this is like gold dust, as it gives me something concrete to go back to the customer with.

My only real concern is email. My customer web sites are nothing more than online brochure sites - no databases, online ordering etc. Most wouldn't know if their website was actually accessible or not.

However, if they stop getting email for even an hour, they are on my case. Being able to provide them with a backup means of email collection via secondary MX record pointers direct to their network means that the days of no email should now no longer happen. It also means that if one of the servers takes longer than anticipated to fix (it happens ....), then the impact is greatly reduced. Just maybe, my customers wouldn't even know that there was email problems in the first place - that would be the equivalent of IT support heaven for me.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Oct 2006 Posts: 156

When a friend of mine got hit by the 1and1 email nightmare the other week I set up a secondary forwarding of his email (his DNS/MX is handled by 1and1 but they had no problems in that department at least!

) to a new gmail account I created for him. So even though messages were taking hours to reach his 1and1 mailbox (and hence his PC) he could view them instantly using the gmail webmail interface.

I'm not saying gmail is necessarily the best "backup mailbox" solution for you but if you want to ensure your customers' email doesn't suffer extended downtime then I guess the trick is to build in redundancy at every stage - i.e. not just MX but also mailboxes as well.

If your domain registrar gives you sufficient control over DNS then you can also reduce the TTL of some/all of the records so that any changes you might want to make propagate more quickly ... maybe this is a bit naughty, not sure ...

but the BBC do it (TTL of their A records appears to be 300s)